Biden to speak with Netanyahu on Gaza ceasefire talks, US official says

U.S. President Joe Biden planned to talk by phone with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Wednesday about ways to keep a potential Gaza ceasefire and hostages deal alive, a U.S. official said.

The call follows U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s whirlwind trip to the Middle East that ended on Tuesday without an agreement between Israel and Hamas militants on a truce in the Palestinian enclave.

Blinken and mediators from Egypt and Qatar have pinned their hopes on a U.S. “bridging proposal” aimed at narrowing the gaps between the two sides in the 10-month-old Gaza war.

Biden was expected to press Netanyahu to soften a new Israeli demand that it be allowed to keep forces along a land corridor between Egypt and Gaza, the U.S. official said.

Biden is on a family vacation in the Santa Ynez Valley of California, staying on an 8,000-acre ranch while Democrats, meeting in Chicago, nominate Vice President Kamala Harris as the party’s nominee for the Nov. 5 presidential election.

Getting a Gaza ceasefire deal is a major priority for Biden. A senior U.S. official on Friday described the talks as close to a deal but a final agreement has been agonizingly elusive.

In talks to halt fighting in the 10-month-old war, Hamas is seeking a complete Israeli withdrawal from Gaza, including the so-called Philadelphi Corridor, a narrow 14.5-km-long (nine-mile-long) stretch of land along the coastal enclave’s southern border with Egypt.

Israel wants to retain control of the corridor, which it captured in late May, after destroying dozens of tunnels beneath it that it says had served to smuggle in weapons to Gaza’s militant groups.