Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was pressured by war cabinet members and senior defense establishment officials to expand the mandate of the negotiating team that traveled Friday to Doha for talks on a hostage deal and truce, Israeli television reported.
According to Channel 12 news, which described the meeting before the delegation’s departure as “dramatic,” Mossad chief David Barnea, Shin Bet head Ronen Bar and Maj. Gen. (res.) Nitzan Alon — who is commanding intelligence efforts to find the abductees — were unwilling to go Qatar to unless there was more room for maneuver in the discussions. It said that Bar explicitly threatened he would not fly to the Qatari capital.
The three reportedly felt that with the instructions that Netanyahu gave them, they did not have a real shot at reaching an agreement to free hostages taken in Hamas’s October 7 terror onslaught.
The network said that war cabinet members Defense Minister Yoav Gallant and Minister Benny Gantz, along with observer Gadi Eisenkot of the latter’s National Unity party, pushed for Netanyahu to give the officials greater flexibility in the negotiations.
The war cabinet members enlisted Shas party leader Aryeh Deri, a close political ally of Netanyahu who is also an observer, to help pressure the premier, the report said, adding that the prime minister ultimately relented and granted the negotiators a broader mandate.
The team later departed for Qatar, where they were due to meet CIA director William Burns, Qatari Prime Minister Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al-Thani and Egypt’s intelligence head Abbas Kamel.
Israel agreed to send the delegation following some reported pressure on Hamas by Qatar and Egypt to soften its demands. The talks will focus on an agreement for a six-week truce in Gaza — based on a framework reached in Paris last month — and the release of some 40 children, women, elderly and sick hostages in the first phase, in exchange for Palestinian prisoners held by Israel and an increase of humanitarian aid to the Strip.
Hamas had said during earlier negotiations that it was seeking a permanent ceasefire, a condition Israel has rejected outright, vowing to stick to its goal of destroying the terror group.
As Barnea and the other officials left for Qatar, an Israeli official told The Times of Israel that “there has been no real progress” in negotiations with Hamas.
“The Americans are dressing it up as progress,” said the source. “The pressure to move forward is coming from them.”
Echoing that assessment, Channel 12 quoted an Israeli source saying the families of hostages should not get the impression that a breakthrough was likely, but also said the talks the talks were progressing.
It also reported, without citing a source, that there was a direct link between Hamas’s purported softening stance and the military’s ongoing operation at Gaza City’s Shifa Hospital. The Israel Defense Forces says the raid has resulted in the arrests of hundreds of terror operatives, including senior figures in Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad.
Commenting Friday on the hostage talks before leaving Israel, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said negotiators have made progress in recent weeks, “closing gaps” between Israel and Hamas, but acknowledged a lot more work still needs to be done.
“Almost by definition when you get down to the last items, they tend to be the hardest,” he told reporters at Ben Gurion Airport, “but we’re determined to try to get it done.”
Blinken was in Israel on the last stop of his sixth diplomatic swing through the region since the Israel-Hamas war erupted on October 7, amid tensions between Washington and Jerusalem over the management of the conflict. He held one-on-one meetings with both Netanyahu and Gantz, along with the war cabinet.
Agencies contributed to this report.