US President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris were scheduled to hold a meeting Monday with hostage negotiators, as senior officials in Washington expressed outrage at Hamas and redoubled their push for a ceasefire and hostage release deal in Gaza following the execution of six abducted Israelis by their captors.
Among those whose bodies were recovered one to two days after being shot to death in a Hamas tunnel beneath the Gaza city of Rafah was Israeli-American hostage Hersh Goldberg-Polin, 23, with Biden and others expressing horror and fury over the killings.
Participants in the situation room meeting, which will bring Biden back to the White House from his Labor Day vacation in Delaware, will discuss how to progress toward a deal that will free the remaining hostages, the White House said.
US President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris were scheduled to hold a meeting Monday with hostage negotiators, as senior officials in Washington expressed outrage at Hamas and redoubled their push for a ceasefire and hostage release deal in Gaza following the execution of six abducted Israelis by their captors.
Among those whose bodies were recovered one to two days after being shot to death in a Hamas tunnel beneath the Gaza city of Rafah was Israeli-American hostage Hersh Goldberg-Polin, 23, with Biden and others expressing horror and fury over the killings.
Participants in the situation room meeting, which will bring Biden back to the White House from his Labor Day vacation in Delaware, will discuss how to progress toward a deal that will free the remaining hostages, the White House said.
It said the meeting would be held with “the US hostage deal negotiating team,” though it was unclear if this referred to the team of mediators led by CIA director Bill Burns seeking to push Israel and Hamas toward a deal, or the Office of the Special Presidential Envoy for Hostage Affairs, which has been involved in bringing captive Americans home from Russia, Afghanistan and elsewhere.
The White House has been working with Egypt and Qatar to put together one final outline for a ceasefire and hostage deal between Israel and the Hamas terror group, the Washington Post reported Sunday.
In Israel, pressure has built in recent weeks for the government to abandon its final demands holding up a deal and bring the hostages home, with the news that three or possibly four of the six executed captives could have been released in the first phase of a potential agreement fueling angry protests and a nationwide strike Monday.
There remain 101 hostages in Gaza, all but four of them abducted during Hamas’s October 7 onslaught in southern Israel, including seven hostages holding American citizenship.
The families of the seven held a virtual meeting with US National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan and White House Mideast czar Brett McGurk Sunday to discuss the weekend’s recovery of the six bodies and ceasefire negotiations.
