On Monday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Israel will not give up the Philadelphi Corridor. On Tuesday, the U.S. says it will.
The White House has announced that its new ceasefire proposal is backed by Israel and would include withdrawing from densely populated areas along the Philadelphi corridor.
“The deal itself, including the bridging proposal that we started working with… includes the removal of Israeli Defense Forces from all densely populated areas… in phase one… and that includes those areas along and adjacent to that corridor,” said White House National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby in a briefing with reporters. “That’s the proposal that Israel had agreed to.”
The fine print, of course, is from “parts” of the Philadelphi corridor.
While reiterating the deal’s requirement for Israel to at least partially withdraw from the Philadelphi in phase one, the White House spokesperson acknowledged that Jerusalem is publicly stressing that it “would need some security along that corridor.”
This whole scenario strangely feels like deja vu from back in May when Biden announced “Israel’s” new plan, which basically sounded like surrender, on Shabbat when government officials in Israel couldn’t respond. When they could, Netanyahu immediately shot down any speculation that he would agree to a deal that withdraws the IDF from Gaza completely, which is how Biden made it sound. Although it was a terrible deal for Israel, they actually held to most of it, but Hamas rejected it.
Now, here we are again, and the Biden administration is announcing a new “miracle” deal on behalf of Israel that conveniently will satisfy the demands of the far left. It’s just a little odd that, again, the news isn’t coming from Israel itself, and it actually directly contradicts what Prime Minister Netanyahu said only the day before.