Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel speaks to a joint session of Congress at the Capitol in Washington on Wednesday, July 24, 2024. (Kenny Holston/The New York Times)
By ISABEL KERSHNER
For many Israelis, it wasn’t what Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said, it was what he didn’t say.
In his speech to Congress on Wednesday, Netanyahu cast the war in the Gaza Strip as a battle for the survival of the Jewish state, a view widely shared across Israel.
But many Israelis want the Israeli leader to agree to a cease-fire that would allow for the release of the 115 remaining hostages in Gaza, at any cost. While Netanyahu spoke of “intensive efforts” to secure the release of the captives, he did not publicly embrace a proposed truce deal being negotiated.
In Israel, the dissonance between the repeated applause from U.S. lawmakers during his address and a grimmer domestic reality was apparent on the front pages of Thursday’s Hebrew-language newspapers, which were dominated by news that the military had recovered the bodies of several hostages from the Palestinian enclave.
Yedioth Ahronoth, a popular mainstream daily, split its front page horizontally, devoting the top half to portraits of four captives whose bodies were recovered, and the bottom half to the speech. A fifth body was subsequently identified by Israeli authorities, who said all five had been killed on Oct. 7, during the Hamas-led assault on southern Israel that prompted the war.
The visit to Washington by Netanyahu, who was preparing for meetings with President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris at the White House on Thursday, was intended to shore up support for the war at home and abroad.
But there is a widespread sense of government failure in Israel as the war has dragged on, with the fighting having expanded to multiple fronts and the leadership offering little vision for what comes next.
“It was a speech devoid of disappointments or good tidings,” wrote Ben-Dror Yemini in Thursday’s Yedioth Ahronoth. “Never, ever was there such a large chasm between high words and contradictory actions.”
In Israel, critics of Netanyahu have accused him of putting his political survival above the fate of the hostages. Two far-right parties that he relies on for his governing coalition have threatened to quit should he agree to a deal on terms that they would deem a surrender to Hamas.
Seeking better terms, Netanyahu has delayed the departure of an Israeli negotiating team that was meant to set out from Israel on Thursday for talks with mediators in Qatar. An Israeli official with knowledge of the talks said only that the team would depart for Qatar sometime after Netanyahu’s meeting with Biden, without specifying a new date.
The Hostages Families Forum, a grassroots organization advocating for the captives’ release, declared a “crisis of trust” in a statement Thursday, accusing Netanyahu of obstructing a deal.
“This foot-dragging is a deliberate sabotage of the chance to bring our loved ones back,” the forum said in its statement, adding, “It effectively undermines the negotiations and indicates a serious moral failure.”
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