After the bodies of six more Israeli hostages were found by Hamas in the Gaza Strip, pressure is mounting in Israel to secure a ceasefire and release the remaining hostages and soldiers captured on October 7, Middle East expert Jeremy Skehl noted in a news report published on DropSite News on Sunday. The announcement that the captives, including a dual US citizen, were found in a tunnel in Rafah has fueled anger at Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, especially from the families of the captives in Gaza.

They accused the prime minister of sabotaging deals to release their loved ones, saying "their blood is on his hands."

Senior Israeli officials, most notably Defense Minister Yoav Galant, have joined public calls for Netanyahu to stop obstructing ceasefire negotiations, while Hamas has said it will not participate in any process until the United States convinces Israel to accept the negotiating framework Hamas agreed to in early July.

Hamas and the families of Israeli prisoners still held in Gaza have said Netanyahu bears responsibility for the continuation of the war and preventing a prisoner exchange.

Now, the White House appears to be hoping that the events of the past two days will change the current course. After being briefed on Saturday evening on the killing of the hostages found in Rafah, President Joe Biden, who is vacationing in Delaware, said, “I think we are close to a deal.”

"We believe we can close the deal, they have all said they agree on the principles," he added.

By Sunday afternoon, street protests were taking place across Israel and Tel Aviv’s mayor announced a general strike on Monday. “We will allow all employees to walk out and support the families’ struggle,” he wrote on Twitter/X.

After a meeting on Sunday with an association of families of Israeli prisoners, the head of the Histadrut, Israel’s largest labor union, announced a general strike. If the action extends beyond a symbolic strike of a day or two, it could become a major crisis for Netanyahu. “Netanyahu abandoned the hostages. This is a fact now. We call on the public to prepare,” the family association said in a statement. “We will bring the country to a standstill. The abandonment is over.”

Vice President Kamala Harris issued a statement endorsing the Israeli version of events regarding the captives found in Rafah, and reiterated Netanyahu’s pledge to eliminate Hamas. “Hamas is an evil organization. With these crimes, Hamas has more American blood on its hands,” she said, referring to the death of Hersh Goldberg Polin, a dual citizen whose parents spoke at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago earlier this month. Goldberg Polin was kidnapped from the Nova Music Festival on Oct. 7 and lost part of his arm after a grenade exploded in a shelter where he was hiding.

“The threat Hamas poses to the people of Israel — and American citizens in Israel — must be eliminated, and Hamas cannot control Gaza,” she added.

Hamas has yet to provide a detailed response to Israel’s accusation that Hamas fighters killed the six prisoners, but it has blamed Israel for their deaths. “We hold the criminal Benjamin Netanyahu and the biased American administration responsible for the failure of negotiations to stop the aggression against our people and release the prisoners in a swap deal,” the group said in a statement. “We also hold him fully responsible for the lives of the prisoners who were killed by his army’s bullets.”

The White House has in recent weeks portrayed its efforts to achieve a ceasefire as being about resolving a handful of technical details, and Harris said she was "working tirelessly" with Biden "around the clock" to achieve a ceasefire in the Gaza war.

But while American negotiators worked to appease Netanyahu, the Israeli leader waged a relentless two-month campaign to thwart the deal, and Hamas denounced the operation and insisted that the American framework it agreed to in early July must be respected.

A Hamas official involved in the ceasefire negotiations told Drop Site News that the vice president and other US officials deliberately misled the public about the operation due to concerns that the Gaza war would hurt Democrats' chances of winning the November elections.

“Kamala Harris is now obsessed with how to defeat Trump, how to win the election, and she knows that the genocide in Gaza and these massacres are a crucial element of the campaign,” Bassem Naim, a member of Hamas’s political bureau, told the website. “She wants to create an illusion that something is going on, which is not true.”

In his interview with Dropsite, Naim said that while the United States wants, for political purposes, a temporary truce that would facilitate the release of Israelis held in Gaza and allow aid to reach the besieged enclave, it has given no indication that it will insist that Israel end its war against the Palestinians in Gaza.

“They are looking for a ceasefire, but they don’t want to end the war permanently,” Naim said. “There is a tactical discussion about how to achieve [Israel’s] goals in a different way that doesn’t hurt America’s image internationally while they support genocide, because they know it hurts their chances of winning elections.”

Naim believes the United States also realizes that Israel’s wars have made it a pariah in the eyes of much of the world, threatening the country’s ability to survive as a key component of U.S. hegemony in the region. “America’s strategic interests in maintaining Israel as a forward base on the front line here are at stake,” Naim says.

It is noteworthy that at the end of last May, Biden laid out what he described as a “roadmap for a permanent ceasefire and the release of all hostages” that was proposed by Israel itself.

“This is a really pivotal moment. Israel has made its proposal,” Biden said on May 31. “Hamas says it wants a ceasefire. This deal is an opportunity to prove whether it really means that. Hamas needs to accept the deal.”

On June 10, the UN Security Council approved a resolution affirming the framework. On July 2, Hamas announced that it had agreed to resume ceasefire talks based on the framework. “We are ready for negotiations that achieve a cessation of aggression and a full withdrawal from the Gaza Strip,” said senior negotiator Khalil al-Hayya, deputy to Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar. “We are ready for real negotiations if Netanyahu commits to the principles set out by President Biden.”

At the time, Hamas negotiators indicated they were open to a three-stage agreement that would not require an immediate commitment to a permanent ceasefire and a full withdrawal of Israeli forces from Gaza as a precondition for moving forward. Before that, Hamas had insisted that any agreement must include clearly defined steps to ensure an end to Israel’s war.

Drop Site News reported that it reviewed internal documents from the negotiations showing that on July 2, Hamas formally informed international mediators that it had accepted the framework, which Hamas says it was informed had been amended by the United States and accepted by Israel on June 24. The amendment removed language Hamas had previously insisted on that called for negotiations to begin no later than 14 days after the first stage of the deal on “the necessary arrangements for the return of sustainable calm (a permanent ceasefire),” according to a draft seen by the site. Hamas believes the compromise was strong evidence of its desire to reach an agreement.

“If you draw a timeline of the negotiations over the past 10 months, you will notice a consistent pattern with the Israelis: Every time we get close to reaching an agreement, they either commit new massacres or back out of the agreement and add new conditions,” Naim said.

Netanyahu's "coup" against his own ceasefire proposal.

Since early July, Netanyahu has intensified Israel’s attacks in Gaza, repeatedly adding new conditions to the framework, and assassinating Ismail Haniyeh, Hamas’s political leader and chief negotiator, in Tehran. Among Netanyahu’s new demands are the right to continue occupying the Philadelphi Corridor along the border with Egypt, maintaining control over the Rafah border crossing, and deploying Israeli forces in central Gaza along the Netzarim axis, where IDF troops will set up checkpoints to screen Palestinians seeking to return to their homes in northern Gaza.

Egypt has objected to Israeli proposals to remain in the Philadelphi Corridor. Israel has asked Cairo to amend the 2005 agreement, a security annex to the 1979 Camp David Accords, which prohibits Israel from deploying troops there. Egypt has rejected this, saying: “Opening a discussion about amending the Camp David Accords could lead to new crises that the Accords may not withstand, especially in light of the growing anger in Egypt over Israeli practices [in Gaza].” Meanwhile, the independent Egyptian news site Madar Misr recently published satellite images showing that Israel has reinforced its presence along Netzarim.

The IDF began bulldozing areas along this axis five months after the war began, insisting it wants to maintain its presence there as part of any agreement with Hamas.

In turn, Naim told the website: “No one in Hamas can accept any form of Israeli presence in the Netzarim corridor and interrogating people as they return home. No one accepts this and accepts a military presence in the Philadelphi corridor and the Rafah crossing. I believe that the only way to reach an agreement is to remove these points from any agreement,” otherwise “this means that we are accepting a permanent occupation of the Gaza Strip.”

Naim also said that Israel is insisting on gaining new veto powers over the release of Palestinian prisoners held by Israel, which would prevent the release of high-value political prisoners, including those from Hamas and other resistance groups who are serving sentences of several decades. “[Netanyahu] has completely changed the terms of the prisoner swap, which were already agreed upon and negotiated months ago,” Naim said. “I think it would be a shame for any Palestinian to accept such a deal.”

Rather than insist on what Biden said was an Israeli proposal on May 31, the United States has gone along with Netanyahu’s efforts to allow an indefinite Israeli troop presence in Gaza and an open-ended campaign of military attacks. Since Haniyeh’s assassination and the selection of Sinwar, Hamas’s Gaza leader, to replace him, Hamas has said it will not participate in what it calls a sham process masquerading as negotiations. “The new conditions he is adding are a coup against his proposal,” Naim said.

Blinken's loss of credibility

In early August, the White House insisted that a ceasefire was within reach, and put forward what it called a “final bridge proposal” to resolve outstanding issues.

“We’re closer than we’ve ever been,” Biden said on August 16. Four days later, Secretary of State Antony Blinken was in Tel Aviv to meet with Netanyahu. “He supports that,” Blinken told reporters after their meeting. “Now it’s incumbent on Hamas to do the same.” Within hours of Blinken’s departure from Israel, Netanyahu’s cronies began leaking stories that refuted those assertions, saying that the Israeli prime minister had in fact convinced Blinken to accept Israel’s continued occupation of parts of Gaza. The United States denied that this had happened.

“Blinken has harmed the entire process because he has lost all credibility as a serious mediator,” Naim said.

"Today we see the worst example of a superpower's foreign minister. Very weak, very weak. It's a huge failure."

Naim added that the proposals, which he called the “bridge proposals,” largely called for Hamas to accept some aspects of the new demands that Netanyahu included after Hamas agreed to the Biden framework and the United Nations.

“We are ready to sit down for negotiations if we discuss an executive plan to implement what we agreed on on July 2,” Naim said. “We are not ready to negotiate a new proposal because [Netanyahu] added new conditions that have nothing to do with the old ones.”

“The high-level talks in Cairo over the past few days have been constructive and conducted in the spirit of all parties to reach a final and implementable agreement,” a State Department official said last month in response to a question from a Jerusalem correspondent. “The process continues through working groups to further address the remaining issues and details. We stress the urgency of reaching an agreement for all parties.”

Hamas insists it has not been directly involved in any negotiations or “working groups,” and only receives updates from Egyptian and Qatari mediators and then provides their responses. “We were not part of the negotiations,” Naim said. “The last round of negotiations was only between the mediators, the Americans and [Israel].”

He added that the mediators told Hamas that the Israeli delegations do not appear to be authorized by Netanyahu to make any decisions and that often, when progress seems possible, Netanyahu vetoes his delegation’s proposals. “They are not authorized to negotiate seriously [on] any point,” Naim said. “It’s just a negotiation between the mediators and the Israelis. Or to be more precise, it’s a negotiation between the mediators, the Americans and Netanyahu. And in this case, the mediator is the Israeli delegation.”

Israel’s security cabinet voted last Thursday to back Netanyahu’s insistence that his forces remain stationed along the Philadelphi Corridor between Gaza and Egypt. Netanyahu’s defense minister, Yoav Galant, objected, according to media reports about the meeting. “The significance of this is that Hamas will not agree to it, so there will be no agreement and no hostages will be released,” Galant said.

"You are running the negotiations alone, and we hear everything after the fact," he added. Netanyahu's proposal was approved by a majority vote, with the exception of Galant, who voted against it.

Naim said the recent optimism expressed by American officials about reaching an agreement to end the war is an attempt to hide an increasingly dangerous reality, the dangers of which were devastatingly demonstrated by the violent Israeli invasion of parts of the West Bank, which began on Wednesday.

"What is happening in Gaza and what is happening in the West Bank is a clear sign, a clear indication that this conflict needs a political solution. The Palestinians have every right to achieve their national goals of dignity, freedom, independence and self-sovereignty," Naim said.

"Leaving these fascist leaders in Israel will destabilize not only the situation here, but the situation in the entire region. Because day after day they are turning this political conflict into a religious conflict," he added.