Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken, continuing his diplomatic tour of the Middle East, was in Egypt on Tuesday to push for a cease-fire in Israel’s war with Hamas.
In Egypt, and then in Qatar, Mr. Blinken would be pressing Hamas leadership through intermediaries to continue talks on a deal to secure a truce and free the remaining hostages in Gaza, a senior administration official said.
Negotiations were expected to resume in Egypt this week, after two days of high-level talks in Qatar ended on Friday without an immediate breakthrough. On Monday, Mr. Blinken discussed the deal with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel in Jerusalem.
In Egypt, Mr. Blinken met with President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi of Egypt at his summer palace in El Alamein, and with the foreign minister, Badr Abdelatty. Later in the day he was heading to Doha, Qatar, to hold talks with Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al-Thani, the country’s emir.
Mr. Blinken “thanked the president for Egypt’s partnership as a mediator on the cease-fire talks,” according to a brief statement by State Department spokesman Vedant Patel.
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 shared Mr. Blinken’s concerns for the potential for violence to spread in the region. Mr. el-Sisi insisted that any cease-fire proposal would need to be followed by a “broader international recognition of the Palestinian state and the implementation of the two-state solution.”
On Monday, Mr. Blinken said Mr. Netanyahu had accepted a Biden administration proposal to bridge some remaining differences with Hamas in order to advance a deal, although Israeli and Hamas officials have expressed skepticism that a breakthrough was near. During meetings with the Israelis, Mr. Blinken emphasized that this was “maybe the last opportunity” to secure a cease-fire agreement.
After the talks in Doha last week, Hamas officials characterized the proposal as being too favorable toward Israel. Details of the proposal have not been made public.
Osama Hamdan, a Hamas official, said in a televised interview on Monday that Hamas had broadly accepted a framework for a cease-fire outlined by President Biden in late May. But he accused Mr. Netanyahu of introducing new conditions to that proposal and said Israeli officials had conceded nothing on key issues in the talks last week.
“We believe that the Americans are solely trying to buy time to allow the genocide to continue,” Mr. Hamdan said on Al Jazeera, the pan-Arab news network. “If the U.S. administration was serious, we wouldn’t need more negotiations — only to implement Biden’s proposal.”
The negotiations for a cease-fire took on renewed urgency after the killings of senior leaders of Hamas and Hezbollah in July. An explosion in Tehran, widely attributed to Israel, killed Hamas’s political leader, Ismail Haniyeh. Hours earlier, an Israeli airstrike in the southern suburbs of Beirut killed Fuad Shukr, a senior commander of Hezbollah, which like Hamas, is backed by Iran.
Iran and Hezbollah have vowed to retaliate for the killings, and Israel has said it would respond powerfully to any attack on its territory, raising the specter of an escalating regional conflict.
Speaking to reporters after his address at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, President Biden said his administration was working nonstop to broker a deal, and that while Hamas seemed to be backing away, he thought a deal was “still in play.”
Michael Levenson contributed reporting.