Netanyahu casts doubt on truce as Israel retrieves six dead hostages

Hamas is expected to reject the ceasefire deal with Israel, as the families of hostages held in Gaza have reportedly been sent ransom demands from the phones of their loved ones.

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken held a three-hour meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Picture: AFP.

Hamas is expected to reject the ceasefire deal with Israel proposed by the US, as the families of hostages held in Gaza have reportedly been sent threatening messages from the phones of their loved ones.

Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar has received the proposals, but Israeli media reports that Jerusalem expects him to stick to the Hamas line and turn the truce down.

It comes amid reports that Hamas has threatened to kill the hostages unless their families “fight the government,” and has demanded ransoms for their safety.

Some of the messages read: “If you don’t fight the government, you won’t see your loved ones return,” Channel 12 reports.

Israel’s intelligence services have warned the threats either come from Hamas or Iranian sources.

Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has also cast doubt on the prospect of a truce with Hamas as he met the grieving families of six hostages whose bodies were retrieved from Gaza by the Israeli military.

After speaking with US Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Monday, Mr Netanyahu stressed to victims groups that he would not budge on red lines, particularly Israel’s control over the Philadelphi Corridor between Gaza and Egypt.

“I am not sure that there will be a [hostage] deal,” Mr Netanyahu said according to a statement put out by victims groups.

“If there is a deal, it will be one that safeguards those [Israeli] interests which I have repeatedly stressed, which is preserving Israel’s strategic assets,” he said.

Earlier, the Israeli Defence Forces recovered the hostages’ bodies from Gaza’s southern area of Khan Younis.

Following intelligence and forensic analysis, the families of the dead hostages had been informed, the military said, without giving details of the operation in Khan Younis.

The recovery of the bodies, in a joint operation between the army and the internal security agency Shin Bet, provided the hostages’ families “with necessary closure and grants eternal rest to the murdered”, the Hostages and Missing Families Forum said.

The campaign group called on the Israeli government to ensure that the ­remaining hostages were also returned to Israel in a negotiated deal.

Mediators Egypt, Qatar and the US are urging Israel and Hamas to agree a ceasefire deal that would help secure the release of remaining hostages in exchange for Palestinian prisoners held in ­Israeli jails.

The hostages were Yagev Buchshtab, Alexander Dancyg, Yoram Metzger, Nadav Popplewell, Chaim Perry, previously ­announced dead, and Avraham Munder, whose kibbutz of Nir Oz near Gaza announced his death earlier on Tuesday.

Among the six bodies released, Metzger, Perry and Dancyg also hailed from Nir Oz, a community near Gaza that was particularly hard hit by the October 7 attack by Hamas on southern Israel.

Palestinian militants abducted Munder, his wife, daughter and grandson that day.

The other family members were released during the single, week-long truce of the war last November, while his son was killed on the day of the attack.

The Hamas attack resulted in the deaths of about 1200 people in Israel, most of them civilians.

Of 251 people taken hostage that day, 105 are still being held hostage inside the Gaza Strip, including 34 the military says are dead.

Israel’s retaliatory military campaign has killed 40,173 Palestinians in Gaza, according to the Hamas-run territory’s health ministry, which does not give details of civilian and militant deaths. Most of the dead in Gaza are women and children according to the UN.

Hopes for a negotiated truce rose slightly on Monday when Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu publicly endorsed a US “bridging proposal” to finalise a hostage deal with Hamas, as the militants took responsibility for a failed suicide attack in Tel Aviv.

After a three-hour meeting with US Secretary of State Antony Blinken in Jerusalem, Mr Netanyahu released a statement backing the proposal for a ceasefire that was presented to Israel and conveyed to Hamas at the end of talks in Doha last week. It was the first time Mr Netanyahu had publicly supported the proposal. “The Prime Minister reiterated Israel’s commitment to the current American proposal on the release of our hostages, which takes into ­account Israel’s security needs, which he strongly insists on,” the Prime Minister’s Office said.

Mr Blinken earlier announced that Israel had accepted the truce proposal and pressured Hamas to do the same, having earlier said the talks may be the “last opportunity” for a ceasefire.

“He supports it. It’s now incumbent on Hamas to do the same,” Mr Blinken said in Tel Aviv on his ninth visit to the Middle East since October 7.

Hamas has rejected the proposal and, referring to a bombing attempt in Tel Aviv on Sunday as a “martyrdom operation” – a term for a suicide attack – said more such attacks would come as long as the war continued.

A Palestinian was killed by a powerful explosion when a bomb the person was carrying went off.

Washington put forward the proposal last week after the most recent round of talks in Qatar.

The terrorist group on Sunday said the bridging proposal ­“responds to Netanyahu’s conditions” and leaves him “fully ­responsible for thwarting the ­efforts of the mediators”.

Mr Blinken arrived in Egypt on Tuesday to resume talks.

AFP