US officials have discussed with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu a draft agreement to end the war in Lebanon that would allow Israel to continue striking Lebanon for two months, a proposal that is likely to be rejected by Hezbollah and the Lebanese government.

The deal, a draft of which The Wall Street Journal says it has seen, includes an agreement between the United States and Israel that would allow Israeli forces to strike Lebanon during a 60-day transitional period in response to imminent threats. The deal would enforce the agreement and relevant U.N. resolutions, including Security Council Resolution 1701, which ended the last war between Israel and Hezbollah in 2006.

The draft proposal also calls for Israel to withdraw its forces from Lebanon after one week, after which time the Lebanese Armed Forces would deploy to the south to help dismantle military infrastructure linked to Hezbollah and other non-state militias.

Israel’s security establishment is pushing for a diplomatic solution in Lebanon, believing it is close to achieving many of its goals. But those close to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu do not expect a deal before the U.S. election, according to a person familiar with his thinking.

So far, neither Hezbollah nor the Lebanese government has reportedly accepted the proposal, which they say gives Israel too much latitude to continue attacking across the border, according to Lebanese and other Arab officials involved in the negotiations. Lebanese officials say they don’t want to publicly drop the deal because the document leaves room for continued negotiations that could eventually end the war, Arab officials told the Wall Street Journal.

The proposal is expected to be part of discussions led by senior US officials who traveled to the region this week as part of a renewed push by the Biden administration to end the wars in both Gaza and Lebanon. CIA Director William Burns met with Egyptian officials in Cairo, while senior White House officials Amos Hochstein and Brett McGurk traveled to Israel, where the State Department said they were scheduled to discuss the Lebanon war.

Netanyahu's office said Thursday that at the start of Netanyahu's meeting with Hochstein on Thursday, "(Netanyahu) made clear that the main point is not this or that agreement on paper but Israel's ability and determination to enforce the agreement and thwart any threat to its security from Lebanon."

A US official said Michael Erik Kurilla, head of US Central Command, also arrived in Israel on Thursday and was expected to travel to Jordan.

The US effort comes in a belated attempt to defuse the Middle East crisis, days before the US presidential election and at a critical time in both Gaza and Lebanon. Israel has launched thousands of airstrikes on Lebanon that have killed more than 2,700 Lebanese citizens, most of them women and children, along with a group of senior Hezbollah leaders, and destabilized the country, uprooting hundreds of thousands of Lebanese citizens from their homes and forcing them to flee.

In Gaza, the ongoing humanitarian crisis is deepening amid growing concerns over the fate of Israeli hostages held by Hamas.

Hezbollah has told mediators that the 60-day transition period also opens the door for Israel to continue what it calls aggression in Lebanon. The Lebanese militant group also says it opposes amending Resolution 1701, which called for both sides to cease fire, for Israeli forces to withdraw from Lebanon, for Israeli overflights to end, and for Hezbollah to withdraw its forces from areas near the Israeli border.

The draft agreement was first reported by Israel’s Kan public broadcaster on Wednesday night. Both the draft and the side letter were dated October 26. Officials familiar with the talks said only minor changes had been made to the draft since then.

Inside Israel, the country's military and other security forces have begun pushing for a deal in Lebanon, arguing that they have achieved many of their goals by striking against Hezbollah, including weakening its missile arsenal.

The Wall Street Journal quotes an Israeli official as saying, “We have certainly reached a point where it is important to take advantage of the huge operational achievements that Israel has made, especially the complete destruction of Hezbollah’s leadership... All negotiations will take place under enemy fire. No one agrees to a cease-fire to negotiate an agreement.”

The newspaper (known for its support for Israel) quotes Arab officials as saying that one sign of progress in the current negotiations is that Hezbollah has secretly indicated its willingness to separate the negotiations on Lebanon from the war in Gaza after a year in which it said it would not stop striking Israel unless there was a ceasefire in Gaza.

Hezbollah's public position is that it continues to link the two conflicts.

“The Israeli enemy will not be able to impose its conditions,” Naim al-Qassam, Hezbollah’s newly appointed secretary-general, said in a televised speech on Wednesday. Qassam was appointed the group’s supreme leader earlier this week after his predecessor, Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, was killed in an Israeli airstrike in Beirut in late September.

In an interview with Lebanese television on Wednesday evening, interim Lebanese Prime Minister Najib Mikati, one of two senior Lebanese officials acting as a mediator between the United States and Hezbollah, said he was "cautiously optimistic" about the possibility of a ceasefire in the coming hours or days.

Lebanese officials have expressed optimism in recent days about the efforts of US officials, including Hochstein, who visited Lebanon last week, saying they welcome an agreement that would enforce Resolution 1701.

The U.S. proposal also includes other provisions likely to raise objections from Hezbollah and Lebanese government leaders. It includes a provision that would allow Israel to fly aircraft over Lebanon for surveillance purposes as long as the aircraft do not break the sound barrier and are “invisible to the naked eye to the extent feasible.” Israel would also be able to launch airstrikes on Lebanon in response to “imminent or emerging threats.”