The Riverside Press-Enterprise
U.S. and 17 other nations call for hostages' release
>> President Joe Biden and the leaders of 17 other nations called on Hamas on Thursday to release all of the hostages seized during its Oct. 7 terrorist attack on Israel, an effort to raise international pressure on the group’s leader in the Gaza Strip to agree to a U.s.-brokered deal.
“The fate of the hostages and the civilian population in Gaza, who are protected under international law, is of international concern,” the leaders said in a joint statement organized and released by the White House, noting that the more than 130 hostages remaining in Gaza include citizens of their countries.
The statement was released a day after Biden met at the White House with Avigail Idan, a 4-year-old dual citizen of Israel and the United States whose parents were killed in the Oct. 7 attack and who was held captive in Gaza for several weeks before being released in an early hostage deal. The president spent an hour with her family as Avigail, whose name has also been spelled Abigail Edan in some U.S. media, played in the Oval Office.
It also came a day after Hamas publicly released a video showing Hersh Goldberg-polin, an Israeli American hostage who was grievously injured during the Oct. 7 attack that killed 1,200 people. It was the first time he had been shown alive since being taken captive. The White House received a copy of the video Monday.
It remains unknown how many of the hostages are still alive.
A senior Hamas official said earlier this month that Hamas did not have 40 living hostages in Gaza who met the criteria for an exchange under a proposed cease-fire agreement.
The United States has proposed a deal through Egyptian and Qatari intermediaries in which Hamas would release 40 of the most vulnerable hostages in exchange for a six-week ceasefire in Gaza and the release of hundreds of Palestinians held in Israeli prisons. A senior administration official said Thursday on condition of anonymity put the blame solely on Hamas for blocking the deal.
The official said that while Israel had signaled it would go along with the deal, the response that came back from Yahya Sinwar, the Hamas leader hiding underground in Gaza, was “totally nonconstructive.” Since then, the official said, Hamas has sent signals that it does not mean to completely reject the deal and is willing to sit down again. The official said the United States and its partners would test that proposition in coming days.