White House frustration with a lack of progress on ceasefire talks between Israel and Hamas boiled over on Friday when spokesman John Kirby delivered an unusually strong rebuke to a hardline Israeli minister.
Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich earlier described a ceasefire proposal as a ‘surrender deal.’
Kirby, a spokesman for the National Security Council, accused him of not caring about the fate of hostages held by Hamas terrorists and said that President Joe Biden would not let ‘extremists’ push talks off course.
‘Some critics, like Smotrich, for example, have claimed that the hostage deal is a surrender to Hamas, or that hostages should not be exchanged for prisoners,’ he said on a briefing call with reporters.
‘Smotrich essentially suggests that the war ought to go on indefinitely without pause and with the lives of the hostages of no real concern at all—his arguments are dead wrong. They’re misleading the Israeli public.’
His reaction underlines tension between the Biden administration and the rightwing coalition that controls Israel.
A day earlier, Biden with the leaders of Qatar and Egypt called on Israel and Hamas to resume ceasefire talks next week in Doha or Cairo.
‘There’s really no further time to waste or excuses for any party for further delay,’ said a senior administration official told reporters. ‘We need to get this deal done.’
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says he will send a delegation but Hamas has yet to respond publicly.
Smotrich, a settler in the West Bank who leads the National Religious Party–Religious Zionism, warned Netanyahu not to end the war before the destruction of Hamas.
‘I call on the prime minister not to fall into this trap and not to agree to a shift, even the slightest, from the red lines he set just recently, and they are also very problematic,’ he posted on X.
His hardline stance comes with the region on the brink of further conflict. Israel is braced for retaliatory strikes after it killed Hezbollah’s top military commander in Lebanon and after it is believed to have assassinated Hamas’ political leader in Iran.
Kirby expressed U.S. fury that an Israeli minister would try to derail ceasefire talks.
He said Smotrich’s stance ‘would in fact sacrifice the lives of Israeli hostages—his own countrymen, and American hostages as well—and flies in the face of the national security interests of Israel at this critical stage of the war.’
The conflict began when Hamas gunmen entered Israel, killing 1200 people on Oct. 7 last year.
Since then the death toll in Gaza has reached more than 39,000 as Israel pounds the territory in an effort to defeat Hamas.
More than 100 hostages remain unaccounted for.