The American website "Axios" quoted three Israeli officials as saying that US President Joe Biden asked Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, during their call last Wednesday, to agree to withdraw Israeli forces from part of the border between Egypt and Gaza, while Netanyahu partially accepted Biden's request and agreed to give up one Israeli position along the border. An Israeli official explained that the area from which the US president requested the withdrawal is a border strip that is one to two kilometers long.

The American website explained that Biden asked Netanyahu to withdraw forces from a small part of the Philadelphi Corridor during the implementation of the first phase of the deal. Israeli officials said that the partial agreement reached by Netanyahu led to the United States supporting the Israeli position that other Israeli occupation forces remain along the Philadelphi Corridor in the first phase of the agreement. The website quoted an Israeli official as saying that after the United States supported Israel’s position, Egypt had to agree to hand over the proposed maps with the updated deployment of the occupation army to Hamas, but the official explained that Tel Aviv does not believe that Hamas will agree to the new maps.

This comes at a time when there is conflicting information in the Israeli media about the results of the Cairo talks on Gaza. The Hebrew Walla website quoted an unnamed senior Israeli official on Friday evening as saying that progress had been made during the negotiations in Cairo on Thursday, as Israel and Egypt narrowed the gaps between them on the issue of deploying Israeli occupation forces along the Philadelphi Corridor. Meanwhile, the Israeli Broadcasting Corporation reported earlier today that the talks “did not make any progress.”

Yesterday, in Cairo, the head of the Israeli General Security Service (Shin Bet) Ronen Bar, the head of the Mossad (Israeli Intelligence Service) David Barnea, and the head of the Israeli military intelligence branch, General Eliezer Toledano, met with the head of the Egyptian intelligence, Abbas Kamel, and other senior Egyptian officials. President Joe Biden’s advisor for Middle East affairs, Brett McGurk, also participated in the talks. A senior Israeli official, who did not name him, told Walla that during the talks, Egypt was given maps of the deployment of Israeli forces in the Gaza Strip in the first stage of the deal, especially along the Philadelphi Corridor. The official said that Israel hopes that Hamas will agree to the Israeli maps and join the negotiations that will take place in Cairo on Sunday, so that mediators can move between the two parties while the negotiation process takes place.

It is worth noting that despite what Walla and the Hebrew media reported about the existence of progress, if true it would be between Egypt and Israel, while Israeli circles, even from within the negotiating team, have recently accused Netanyahu of introducing new conditions to the proposed deal in order to obstruct it, while Hamas demanded a return to the July 2 proposal that it had previously agreed to and that Netanyahu had thwarted, which means that talk of progress between Israel and Egypt does not necessarily mean that it will lead to progress against Hamas.