Benjamin Netanyahu has offered a new deal to Hamas that would see Israel pay $1m for each of the remaining Oct 7 hostages and allow their captors to leave.
The Israeli prime minister’s plan would involve his country’s military guaranteeing safe passage out of Gaza for the Palestinians holding Israeli hostages.
An Israeli official said the hostage-takers and their families would be allowed to leave Gaza and avoid capture or punishment under the agreement, with the Israeli government paying millions for the hostages.
The initiative was put in motion following Sunday’s security cabinet meeting, at which the hostage situation was discussed.
Hamas has not yet responded to the initiative, first revealed by the Israeli broadcaster Channel 12.
It comes after the terror group turned down a proposal put forward by Egypt that would have seen a two-day ceasefire declared in Gaza if they had agreed to return four Israeli hostages.
Antony Blinken, the US secretary of state, said Hamas “once again refused to release even a limited number of hostages to secure a ceasefire and relief for the people of Gaza”.
Taher al-Nunu, a Hamas official, told AFP that the idea of a “temporary pause in the war, only to resume aggression later, is something we have already expressed our position on. Hamas supports a permanent end to the war, not a temporary one”.
Meanwhile, David Barnea, the director of Mossad who heads the Israeli negotiations team, reportedly told the families of hostages that the chances of reaching a deal are slim.
“We still haven’t got any response from the mediators, neither for the Qatari proposal nor the Egyptian one, in any official capacity, so it’s best to wait. Right now the chances for a deal are very slim,” he said, according to Channel 12.
It follows the arrest of Eli Feldstein, Mr Netanyahu’s spokesman, who is accused of leaking sensitive intelligence documents from the IDF.
Mr Feldstein, 32, who failed a security background check before entering his role last year, allegedly leaked a story suggesting Hamas was not interested in reaching a ceasefire deal. The scandal sparked an intense debate in Israel over Mr Netanyahu’s role in the affair.
Yair Lapid, the leader of the opposition, lashed out at the prime minister, saying he “has no influence or control over the bodies he leads”.
He added: “If that’s true, he’s ineligible, he’s not qualified to lead the State of Israel in the most difficult war in its history.”
Menahem Mizrahi, the head of Rishon Lezion magistrate’s court, said at the weekend that the leak posed a serious risk of harm “to state security and to information sources”.
The court added that the leak could have caused damage to the “ability of defence bodies to achieve the goal of freeing the hostages”.
On Monday, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported that another four suspects had been arrested, all of whom served in the IDF’s Intelligence unit.
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