Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu speaks during a news conference in Jerusalem.
Credit: Reuters Photo
Jerusalem: Brushing aside pleas from allies and the demands of Israeli protesters for an immediate cease-fire in the Gaza Strip in exchange for the release of hostages, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Monday vowed to maintain Israeli control along the border between Egypt and Gaza, a contentious plan that appeared to dim, if not dash, prospects for a truce.
In his first news conference since the bodies of six slain hostages were recovered over the weekend, Netanyahu told reporters Monday night that, to ensure its security, Israel needed to assert control over the Gaza side of the border with Egypt, known as the Philadelphi Corridor, calling it the lifeline of Hamas.
Hamas has said Israeli control of the corridor is a nonstarter in negotiations for a truce, demanding instead a complete Israeli withdrawal from Gaza.
"If we leave, there will be enormous diplomatic pressure upon us from the whole world not to return," Netanyahu said of the corridor, as a large crowd protested near his private residence in Jerusalem on Monday night.
Netanyahu made the comments a day after the Israeli military announced that the six hostages had been found dead in a tunnel underneath the southern Gaza city of Rafah. The discovery devastated Israelis and spurred the mass protests Sunday and a widespread work stoppage by the country's largest labor union.
But despite the national grief, the strike Monday was a mixed success, and subsequent protests throughout the day were relatively muted, revealing a country deeply divided over how to end the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza.
Many Israelis support a cease-fire deal to bring home the hostages. But others, particularly on the right, support Netanyahu's security conditions and reject any agreement with Hamas.
In the hours before Netanyahu spoke Monday night, two close allies of Israel signaled mounting frustration with the direction of the war in Gaza.
President Joe Biden issued a one-word rebuke of Netanyahu's unwillingness to yield on his conditions for a cease-fire and hostage-release deal. Asked a series of questions by reporters about whether Netanyahu was doing enough for a deal to get back the hostages, he said, "No."
And Britain announced that it would suspend the exports of some weapons to Israel, a significant hardening of its position on the war in Gaza under a new Labour government. British Foreign Secretary David Lammy said the decision was based on a legal review that concluded there was a "clear risk" that the weapons could be used in a way that would breach international law.
Netanyahu suggested Monday that the pursuit and killing of Hamas militants in Gaza would go on unabated. "We are crushing Hamas," he said, adding, "But we still need to take away its ability to rule" in Gaza.
Hamas, he said, "would pay a heavy price" for the deaths of the six hostages, and he questioned what message it would send if Israel let up in the fighting. "Slay hostages and you'll get concessions?" he said.
The failure of the protests and labor strikes to persuade Netanyahu to change course appeared to be a reflection of the increasingly deep fissures in Israeli society over the course of the war. Netanyahu's hawkish right-wing allies are urging the destruction of Hamas militants in Gaza, scoffing at calls for an immediate cease-fire as tantamount to capitulation.
Flights at Ben-Gurion International Airport were disrupted for two hours Monday morning, protesters blocked intersections in some Israeli cities, and schools, banks and some municipal offices closed or cut services in response to the call for a strike by Israel's largest labor union. But there were also many signs of business as usual across the country.
Many municipalities continued work as normal, and some transport services returned to operation by Monday afternoon. In Jerusalem, where few shops were closed, Yaakov Levi, 60, the owner of a wine store, said he was sympathetic to the protests but questioned whether a strike would achieve anything.
Union leaders agreed to halt the labor strike at 2:30 pm, more than eight hours after it began, after a court ruled that the work stoppage was "political" and that organizers had not given enough notice for it to go ahead.
The protests in Tel Aviv, Israel, on Sunday night appeared to be the largest of the war, an outpouring of grief over the death of the six hostages.
On Monday, thousands of mourners gathered in a cemetery in Jerusalem for the burial of one of the hostages, Hersh Goldberg-Polin, an Israeli American whose parents had crisscrossed the globe to lobby for their son's freedom, meeting with Biden, United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres and Pope Francis.
The funeral was attended by Israeli President Isaac Herzog, who spoke of the plight of the remaining hostages in Gaza, pressing the country's leaders "to save those who can still be saved."
"This is not a political goal, and it must not become a political dispute," he said. "It is a supreme moral, Jewish and human duty of the state of Israel to its citizens."
Amid the grieving, Hamas on Monday released a roughly two-minute video that appeared to show Eden Yerushalmi, another of the six hostages killed in Gaza. It is not clear when the video was filmed.
In the video, Yerushalmi, 24, calls on Netanyahu to reach a cease-fire deal and says she fears for her life amid the Israeli military strikes. The circumstances of how the video was filmed were unclear, and the footage appears to have been edited.
Rights groups and international law experts say that a hostage video is, by definition, made under duress, and that the statements in it are usually coerced. Israeli officials have called the videos a form of "psychological warfare," and experts say their production can constitute a war crime.
The Biden administration has insisted that it retains hope for a cease-fire in Gaza and the return of the approximately 100 hostages who still remain in Gaza, dozens of whom are presumed dead by Israeli authorities. Asked Monday by reporters whether he was planning to present a final hostage deal this week, Biden responded: "We're very close to that."
But Israeli and Hamas officials have voiced skepticism over positive cease-fire predictions by the Biden administration. They say the differences between the two warring parties are still entrenched, particularly over issues such as the Philadelphi Corridor.
Tor Wennesland, a senior UN official who visited Gaza on Monday, painted a picture of desolation and despair.
"The scale of destruction is immense, the humanitarian needs are colossal and soaring, and civilians continue to bear the brunt of this conflict," Wennesland said. "I unequivocally condemn the horrifying civilian death toll in Gaza."
Medical teams distributed polio vaccines Monday, the second day of an urgent campaign to stem the spread of the crippling disease. The United Nations has described the emergence of polio, a disease eradicated from most of the world, as a measure of the collapse of Gaza society and infrastructure after nearly 11 months of bombardments.