Netanyahu compares Hamas ceasefire offer to a disingenuous publicity move

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Tuesday slammed Hamas’s latest ceasefire proposal as an insincere offer and choreographed public relations move meant to stall Israel’s planned ground offensive in Rafah.

“Hamas’s proposal yesterday was meant to torpedo the entry of our forces into Rafah,” he said in a video statement. “That did not happen.”

The purpose of the Rafah operation is to bring back the hostages and eliminate Hamas, Netanyahu said, adding that Israel “already proved in the previous hostage release [that] military pressure on Hamas is a precondition for the return of the hostages.”

He also said Hamas’s latest offer “lies very far from Israel’s necessary demands.”

Despite his comments, he sent an Israeli delegation to peace talks in Cairo.

Netanyahu has been under increased international pressure to reach a ceasefire agreement.

A day earlier, Hamas’s political leader, Ismail Haniyeh, said the group would accept the terms of a ceasefire championed by Egyptian and Qatari mediators, though with slight modifications. But within hours, Israeli troops and tanks made their way into the city of Rafah and took the vital border crossing with Egypt, cutting off the flow of aid into Rafah.

A Palestinian official said “all movement on the Rafah crossing had stopped after Israeli tanks captured the facility on the Palestinian side.”

“Passenger movement and entry of aid to the Gaza Strip has completely ceased,” Wael Abu Omar, a spokesman for the General Authority of Border and Crossing, told CNN Tuesday.

The facility was the sole crossing between Gaza and Egypt.

The United Nations said that the closing of two major border crossings in southern Gaza would have catastrophic effects in the area.

Andrew De Domenico, who is in charge of the United Nations’s humanitarian agency for Palestinian territories, said the three hospitals in Rafah may be inoperable within just a few hours, cutting 1.5 million civilians squeezed into the area off from healthcare.

Hamas has been demanding that a ceasefire agreement lead to a permanent halt in fighting as well as the full withdrawal of Israeli forces from the Gaza Strip. Israel said it wants a temporary ceasefire for a hostage exchange but has vowed to keep fighting until Hamas has been dismantled.

Regional leaders approached Hamas’s declaration of a ceasefire deal Monday with cautious optimism and it was not clear immediately what the ceasefire actually entailed.

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The White House said Tuesday that a more detailed reading of Israel and Hamas’s separate negotiating positions on a hostage deal shows the two sides come to a compromise.

CIA Director William Burns, along with Israeli and Hamas officials, are expected to meet in Cairo today to restart talks that stalled on Sunday.