Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken pressed on Tuesday for a cease-fire in the Gaza Strip, but officials familiar with the latest U.S.-backed proposal said it left major disagreements between Hamas and Israel unresolved.
After meeting with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel on Monday, Mr. Blinken said that Israel had accepted the U.S. proposal — the details of which have not been made public — and that the onus was now on Hamas to agree to it as well. But Israeli and Hamas officials have downplayed the idea that a deal could be imminent, saying that mediators’ efforts — and the latest American proposal aimed at bridging gaps between the two sides — have failed to resolve some of the most substantive disputes in the talks.
Mediators have previously called for high-level talks to resume in Cairo this week. A senior Biden administration official said on Tuesday night that he expected negotiations to continue this week, but declined to say when. Two Israeli officials said it was unclear where and when they would next convene.
President Biden, who remarked briefly on the negotiations after his speech at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago on Monday night, drew a critical response from Hamas after he said the group was “now backing away” from a cease-fire deal.
On Tuesday, as Mr. Blinken traveled to Egypt and Qatar to push for an agreement, Hamas said it was eager to reach a cease-fire but that the latest American proposal was “a reversal” from what it had agreed to in early July. Hamas accused the United States of bowing to what it called “new conditions” from Israel.
Before boarding his return flight to the United States, Mr. Blinken told reporters: “This needs to get done. And it needs to get done in the days ahead and we will do everything possible to get it across the finish line.”
While many details of the plan remain unclear, at least parts of the American bridging proposal appeared to conform to new demands added by Mr. Netanyahu in late July, according to Israeli and Hamas officials familiar with the talks, such as Israeli troops remaining along Gaza’s border with Egypt.
Under the new U.S. proposal, Israeli troops would be able to continue to patrol part of that border area, albeit in reduced numbers, according to four officials familiar with the talks, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.
Mr. Netanyahu has insisted on maintaining an Israeli military presence in the area, known as the Philadelphi Corridor, saying it needs to prevent Hamas from using a network of tunnels under the border to smuggle arms into Gaza from Egypt.
Hamas has repeatedly rejected the idea of keeping Israeli troops in the border area saying that any deal to stop the war must involve a complete withdrawal of Israeli forces from Gaza.
Egypt has strenuously disputed that there is a tunnel network under the border, saying that over the past decade it has destroyed 1,500 tunnels and fortified a wall on its Gaza frontier. It has also staunchly objected to Israeli troops remaining in the Philadelphi Corridor, which it says would pose national security concerns and could anger the Egyptian public.
During the most recent round of cease-fire talks, which ended on Friday, U.S. officials asked to delay in-depth negotiations on Israel’s demand to screen displaced Palestinians returning to northern Gaza for weapons, according to two officials familiar with the talks. That leaves another major stumbling block unresolved, the officials said.
The stakes for Israel were underscored on Tuesday when the Israeli military said it had recovered the bodies of six Israeli hostages in an overnight operation in southern Gaza. Israel’s defense minister, Yoav Gallant, said that the bodies had been retrieved from Hamas tunnels beneath the city of Khan Younis.
Avraham Munder, 79, was the only one of the six whose death had not been previously established. He was abducted from Nir Oz, a kibbutz near the Gaza border, along with three of the others: Haim Peri, 80; Yoram Metzger, 80; and Alexander Dancyg, 75. The remaining two, Nadav Popplewell, 51; and Yagev Buchshtab, 35, were taken from another border community, Nirim.
Hamas has said some of the six hostages were killed by Israeli airstrikes. An Israeli military spokesman, Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari, said on Tuesday that the bodies would be examined to provide the families of the dead with answers.
In an interview on Tuesday with Israel’s public radio network, Mr. Dancyg’s son, Mati, accused Mr. Netanyahu of failing to make a deal to free the hostages because of political pressure from members of his governing coalition who oppose a cease-fire with Hamas.
“It is absolutely clear to me that it was possible to bring him back home,” Mati Dancyg said, adding, “Netanyahu chose to sacrifice the hostages.’’
Mr. Netanyahu, who has blamed Hamas for obstructing a deal, said in a statement about the recovery of the bodies: “Our hearts grieve over the terrible loss. The State of Israel will continue to make every effort to return all of our hostages — the living and the deceased.”
Israeli forces have rescued only seven hostages alive, of the roughly 250 who were seized during the Hamas-led Oct. 7 attack. Scores of others, mostly women and children, were returned to Israel during a weeklong cease-fire last November. More than 100 captives still remain in Gaza, more than 30 of whom are believed to be dead.
Without a deal to stop the fighting, the Israeli military has forged ahead with its offensive in Gaza.
On Tuesday, it struck a school building in Gaza City, targeting what it said was a Hamas command-and-control center. The Palestinian Civil Defense agency, a part of the Hamas-run Interior Ministry in Gaza, said that 12 people, including women and children, had been killed in the strike.
In recent weeks, Israel has launched dozens of strikes on school buildings, which have not operated as schools since the war began and are being used as shelters by displaced Palestinians. The Israeli military has said that Hamas uses civilian buildings as military bases.
On Tuesday, Mr. Blinken, hoping to advance a deal to halt the fighting in Gaza, met with President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi of Egypt at his summer palace on Egypt’s Mediterranean coast. Mr. Blinken then traveled to Doha, Qatar, to hold talks with Qatari officials. Both Egypt and Qatar have been key meditators in the cease-fire talks.
Mr. el-Sisi’s office said in a statement that the Egyptian leader had been “keen to stress that the time has come to end the ongoing war,” and that he shared Mr. Blinken’s concerns that violence could potentially spread in the region.
The push for a cease-fire has taken on renewed urgency since an explosion on July 31 in Tehran — widely attributed to Israel — killed Hamas’s political leader, Ismail Haniyeh, hours after an Israeli airstrike killed Fuad Shukr, a senior Hezbollah commander, in the southern suburbs of Beirut.
Hezbollah and Iran have vowed to retaliate for the killings, and Israel has said it would respond powerfully to any attack on its territory, raising the prospect of a dangerous escalation in conflict in the Middle East.
At a news conference in Tehran on Tuesday, Gen. Ali Mohammad Naeini, a spokesman for the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, a branch of Iran’s armed forces, suggested that Iran was not rushing to respond to the killing of Mr. Haniyeh.
“Time is on our side and its possible that the wait period for the response could take a long time” General Naeini said. “It’s possible that Iran’s response will not be a repeat of previous operations.”
He did not elaborate, but his reference to “previous operations” suggested Iran would not launch hundreds of missiles and drones toward Israel as it did in April, when it retaliated for an Israeli strike on an Iranian embassy compound in Damascus. Israeli, U.S. and allied forces shot down most of those missiles and drones before they could cause major damage in Israel.
Reporting was contributed by Michael Levenson, Isabel Kershner, Vivian Yee, Emad Mekay, Farnaz Fassihi, Matthew Mpoke Bigg and Anushka Patil.
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