The Israeli Cabinet had been set to meet early on Jan. 16 to ratify the deal already hammered out by negotiators.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office has accused Hamas of reneging on parts of the Gaza cease-fire agreement in a bid “to extort last-minute concessions.”
Netanyahu said the Israeli Cabinet—which had been scheduled to meet on the morning of Jan. 16 to ratify the deal—would not meet until Hamas backed down, and his office described it as a “last-minute crisis.”
A statement from Netanyahu’s office, emailed to The Epoch Times, said: “Hamas reneges on parts of the agreement reached with the mediators and Israel in an effort to extort last-minute concessions. The Israeli cabinet will not convene until the mediators notify Israel that Hamas has accepted all elements of the agreement.”
However, Hamas leader Sami Abu Zuhri told the Saudi-owned Al Arabiya TV that Netanyahu’s claims were unfounded and urged the Biden and Trump administrations to “oblige” the Israelis to implement the agreement.
Netanyahu spokesman David Mencer said at a news briefing on Jan. 16, “Last night the prime minister strongly insisted that Hamas fold their last-minute demand to change the deployment of IDF forces in the Philadelphi corridor, which is so important, so crucial to stop weapon smuggling to Hamas.”
He said the Israeli delegation would remain in Doha, Qatar, waiting for the agreement to be finalized.
Mencer said: “To be clear the government of Israel wants to finalize an agreement. We want to bring our people home and we hope the details will be finalized.”
He claimed that Hamas had been decimated and its leadership eliminated.
“Hamas is not just Israel’s enemy, it is also the enemy of the Gazan people. They have used ordinary Gazans as human shields, deliberately maximizing civilian casualties to fuel their own propaganda,” Mencer said, adding that Israel was “liberating Gaza from Hamas’s tyranny.”
Late on Jan. 15, U.S. officials and the Qatari prime minister said that Hamas’s and Israel’s negotiators had agreed to a three-phase cease-fire deal, which would include the release of the remaining 100 hostages in exchange for the freeing of Palestinian prisoners.
