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Netanyahu denies Hamas claim that he torpedoed hostage deal

Two Israeli officials had joined the terror group in blaming Netanyahu in interviews with The New York Times.

By Batya Jerenberg, World Israel News

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu denied Hamas claims Monday that the ceasefire negotiations are in crisis due to anything he has said.

“The claim that Prime Minister Netanyahu and not Hamas is the one who sabotaged the hostage release deal is a complete lie and a deliberate deception of the public,” his office said in a statement.

“The truth is completely the opposite, Hamas is the one that frustrates every deal by not moving a millimeter from its extreme demands that no government in Israel can accept,” the statement added.

The denial came a day after a senior Hamas official, Mousa Abu Marzouk, told The New York Times that “We were very close, but Netanyahu’s narrow-mindedness aborted an agreement.”

He made clear that the “narrow-mindedness” Hamas didn’t like was that Netanyahu rejected the terrorist organization’s never-changing position that Israel must agree to a “permanent and fixed ceasefire” that would preempt any IDF invasion of Hamas’ last stronghold in Rafah.

This is not a new stance, however.

With the backing of his entire war cabinet and a majority of the people, the prime minister has repeatedly stated that any deal would be for only a temporary halt to the fighting, even if the cessation lasted for several months so that Israel could retrieve bodies and not just live hostages.

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In a video clip recently released by Hamas as part of its psychological warfare against Israel, hostage Hersh Goldberg-Polin stated that 70 were not alive anymore.

Israeli authorities have said that they know that at least three dozen of the remaining 133 abductees are dead.

The New York paper also cited two unnamed Israeli officials who blamed Netanyahu for the breakdown in the talks that were being held in Cairo because he had said again Sunday that an invasion of Rafah would occur “with or without a hostage deal.”

Citing one of the Israelis, the daily said that this “had compelled Hamas to harden its demands in an attempt to ensure that Israeli forces won’t enter the city.”

Israeli insistence on dealing with Rafah militarily stems from the belief that without the IDF destroying Hamas’ last four intact divisions in the southern Gaza city, the country would be sowing the seeds for the next invasion and genocidal killing spree, as happened on October 7, 2023.

Netanyahu had warned Hamas that it had a week to accept the current Israeli proposal, which the United States has called “extraordinarily generous,” or else the Rafah operation would begin.

The IDF announced Monday that it had started evacuating civilians from the eastern part of the city to an expanded safe zone with food, shelter and field hospitals, in preparation for its incursion.