Axios quoted a senior Israeli official and two other sources as saying that Israel delivered its updated proposal for a ceasefire and prisoner release agreement in the Gaza Strip to the United States on Saturday, which included new demands that could complicate the conclusion of the deal.

The website explained that the proposal was submitted before a meeting on Sunday in Rome between the head of the Israeli Mossad, David Barnea, the director of the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), William Burns, the Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign Affairs of Qatar, Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani, and the head of Egyptian intelligence, Abbas Kamel, to discuss the deal.

The website revealed that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has toughened his position on the deal and added new demands, such as establishing a mechanism to monitor the movement of Palestinian weapons and militants from southern Gaza to the north, and maintaining Israeli control over the border between Gaza and Egypt.

An Israeli official said the updated proposal included mention of establishing a foreign mechanism to monitor and prevent the transfer of militants and weapons from the southern Gaza Strip to the north, but without specifying how this mechanism would work or who would be responsible for it.

The Israeli official pointed out that the proposal also includes changes in the locations where Israeli army forces will be redeployed in the Gaza Strip in the first phase of the deal, in addition to the condition that Israeli army forces remain in the Philadelphi Corridor on the border between the Gaza Strip and Egypt during the implementation of the first phase.

According to Axios, Israeli negotiators were not optimistic on Friday that the meeting in Rome would lead to a breakthrough, and doubted that US President Joe Biden's pressure on Netanyahu had persuaded him to soften some of his tough new demands in the updated Israeli proposal.

"Netanyahu wants a deal that is impossible to get," an Israeli official said. "At the moment, he is not willing to move, so we may be heading towards a crisis in the negotiations rather than a deal."

Biden told the families of American prisoners on Thursday that he would continue to push for a deal in his remaining time in office.

In turn, the families of a number of Israeli prisoners in Gaza said that Netanyahu's new conditions aim to thwart the exchange deal and put the kidnapped in danger.

These families added in a press conference in Tel Aviv that "Netanyahu's policies lead to the killing of the kidnapped and that they will not allow him to abort the exchange deal."

According to these families, Netanyahu is working to thwart the prisoner exchange deal for the sake of his political ambition.

Yesterday, Netanyahu announced that he would send a delegation to new talks scheduled to be held in the Italian capital, Rome, tomorrow, Sunday, to discuss a ceasefire in Gaza and a prisoner exchange.

Qatar and Egypt, in cooperation with the United States, are mediating indirect talks between the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas) and Israel to cease fire in Gaza and exchange prisoners based on a three-stage formula, presented by President Biden at the end of last May.

For more than 9 months, Israel, with American support, has been waging what international experts describe as a war of extermination against the Palestinians in Gaza, where about 130,000 Palestinians, most of them children and women, have been killed or injured, and more than 10,000 others have gone missing, according to data from the Ministry of Health in the besieged Strip.