President Joe Biden on Friday wrote to the leaders of Egypt and Qatar, calling on them to press Hamas for a hostage deal with Israel, according to a senior administration official.
The move came one day after Mr Biden called on Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu to redouble efforts to reach a ceasefire in the six-month-old war in Gaza.
The official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the private letters, said Mr Biden’s national security adviser will meet on Monday with family members of some of the estimated 100 hostages who are believed to still be in Gaza.
The letters, to Egyptian president Abdel Fattah el-Sisim and Qatar’s ruling emir, Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, come as Mr Biden has deployed CIA Director Bill Burns to Cairo for talks this weekend about the hostage crisis.
White House officials said negotiating a pause in fighting between Israel and Hamas to facilitate the exchange of hostages held in Gaza for Palestinian prisoners held in Israel is the only way to put a temporary ceasefire into effect and boost the flow of badly humanitarian aid into the territory.
Mr Biden, in his conversation with Netanyahu, “made clear that everything must be done to secure the release of hostages, including American citizens”, and discussed “the importance of fully empowering Israeli negotiators to reach a deal”, according to the official. The first phase of the proposed deal would secure the release of women and elderly, sick and wounded hostages.
White House national security spokesman, John Kirby, said earlier Friday that Mr Biden underscored the need to get a hostage deal done during a Thursday conversation with Mr Netanyahu that largely focused on Israeli airstrikes that killed seven aid workers with World Central Kitchen.
“We are coming up on six months – six months that these people have been held hostage. And what we have to consider is just the abhorrent conditions” the hostages are being held in, Kirby said. “They need to be home with their families.”
Mr Biden had expressed optimism for a temporary ceasefire and a hostage deal during the run-up to the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, but an agreement never materialised.
The White House said in a statement on Thursday, following Mr Biden’s call with Mr Netanyahu, that the US president said reaching an “immediate ceasefire” in exchange for hostages was “essential” and urged Israel to reach such an accord “without delay”.
White House officials acknowledge that Mr Biden has become increasingly frustrated with Israel’s prosecution of a grinding war that has killed more than 33,000 Palestinians.
The war in Gaza began when Hamas-led militants stormed into southern Israel, killing some 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and taking about 250 people hostage.
The Israeli military campaign in Gaza, experts say, is among the deadliest and most destructive in recent history.
Within two months, researchers say, the offensive already has wreaked more destruction than the razing of Syria’s Aleppo between 2012 and 2016, Ukraine’s Mariupol or, proportionally, the Allied bombing of Germany in the Second World War.
It has killed more civilians than the US-led coalition did in its three-year campaign against the Islamic State group.
The White House has maintained its support for Israel amid growing domestic and international wariness with Israel’s prosecution of the war, and repeatedly said that a temporary ceasefire could have already come had Hamas agreed to release the sick, the wounded, the elderly, and young women.
But the pressure on Mr Biden has only mounted since this week’s airstrikes that killed the World Central Kitchen workers.
The Israeli government acknowledged “mistakes” and announced some disciplinary measures against officers involved in ordering the strikes. Israel also approved a series of steps aimed at increasing the flow of humanitarian aid into Gaza, including the reopening of a key crossing that was destroyed in the October 7 Hamas attack.
UN secretary-general Antonio Guterres said on Friday that the World Central Kitchen incident is part of a broader problem with how the Israeli military is carrying out the war. Nearly 200 humanitarian aid workers have been killed since start of the conflict.
“But the essential problem is not who made the mistakes, it is the military strategy and procedures in place that allow for those mistakes to multiply time and time again,” he said. “Fixing those failures requires independent investigations and meaningful and measurable change on the ground.”