Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu pledged to pursue victory over Hamas as the war cabinet prepared to examine on Monday an Egyptian proposal for a new hostage deal and Islamic Jihad representatives visited Cairo.
"Citizens of Israel, we are intensifying the war in the Gaza Strip. We will continue to fight until absolute victory over Hamas,” Netanyahu said in a public statement he issued on video.
“This will take time, but we are united – the soldiers, the people and the Government. We are united and determined to fight until the end,” Netanyahu said.
He told the government at its weekly meeting on Sunday, that he repeated this message to US President Joe Biden when the two men spoke the night before.
According to the White House, the two leaders discussed the “importance of securing the release of all remaining hostages” as well as the “objectives and phasing of the war.”
The US has sought to sway Israel to transition to a lower-intensity campaign, particularly in light of the high fatality rate. Hamas has asserted that over 20,000 Palestinians have been killed by war-related violence. Israel has maintained that some 8,000 of those fatalities are Hamas terrorists.
'The war has a price'
Netanyahu paid homage in his remarks to the rising IDF death toll after 14 soldiers were killed over the weekend.
“The war has a price, a very heavy price in the lives of our heroic soldiers, and we will do everything to safeguard the lives of our soldiers,” he said.
The military campaign, he said, was the only way to safeguard Israel and secure the return of the hostages. “This is the only way to return our hostages, eliminate Hamas and ensure that Gaza will no longer be a threat to Israel.”
According to the Saudi news website Asharq, Cairo has proposed a three-phase deal which the Hamas leadership in debating in Doha. Egypt and Qatar have both been working on mediating a second hostage deal.
A Hamas delegation was in Cairo last week and representatives of the Islamic Jihad, a group that is also holding hostages in Gaza, is there this week.
According to the Egyptian proposal outlined in Asharq, some 40 Israeli hostages, including remaining women and children as well as elderly men would be freed. Israel in exchange would allow for a two-week pause to the war, which could be extended upon agreement. Humanitarian aid, including fuel, would continue to enter the enclave during that period.
It would also agree to release some 120 Palestinians held in Israeli jails on security charges, likely based on the previous deal, by which three prisoners were freed for every Israeli hostage that was released. The category of prisoners, women, minors and elderly is expected to match the category of hostages that would be freed.
Egyptian-held talks to reunify Hamas, Fatah
The second phase would involve Egyptian-held talks to reunify Hamas and Fatah. The two factions have been divided since the Hamas forcibly ousted Fatah from Gaza in a bloody coup in 2007. The talks would also involve the creation of a technocrat Palestinian government for Gaza that would supervise humanitarian aid and reconstruction efforts. It would also plan for Palestinian general and presidential elections.
The third phase would include a deal for all the remaining hostages in exchange for an end to the war and the release of Palestinian prisoners jailed for their involvement in killing Israelis, according to Ashraq.
Israel has insisted that it would not end the war until Hamas is destroyed, irrespective of any hostage release but the first part of the deal is in line with proposals Israel has made.
An Islamic Jihad official said that its talks in Cairo would center on "ways to end the Israeli aggression on our people.”
The delegation will reaffirm the group's position that any exchange of hostages will have to secure the release of all Palestinians jailed in Israel, "after a ceasefire is achieved," the official said.
There are some 129 hostages in Gaza, out of the some 250 that Hamas seized when it infiltrated southern Israel on October 7, killing over 1,200 people. Some 110 have already been released.
In a special address on Sunday night, President Isaac Herzog said the obligation to return the “hostages in anyway possible is an indelible commandment burned deep in our consciousness. We will not rest until they are home.”
In this difficult time, he urged Israelis to put aside their political differences,
“The enemy is just waiting to see the cracks within us, for us to start fighting one another. They also see the conflicts, the arguments, the struggles between egos, the political conflicts – both in the days before, and in the days after. They celebrate when they see the cracks between us,” Herzog said.
It is important that Israelis "End the internal struggles and division.”
Herzog said he understood that “arguments and debates are part of our DNA. It is perfectly allowed – even necessary – to dispute and criticize, even in wartime, but there is a way to argue.”
It is important, however, he said, that Israel not return to the kind of divisions that existed prior to the October 7 attack.
“We must not return to the poison online. We must not return to the discourse of “us and them”. In particular, I want to caution that anyone who seeks to bring us back to the discourse of October 6, is harming the war effort and the security the citizens of the country.”
“This moment is a test: We will not break, nor blink, nor fall apart, and we certainly will not tear ourselves apart from the inside. We shed a tear - and we shoulder on together,” Herzog said.
Reuters contributed to this report.