Netanyahu's ceasefire doublespeak: Dovish with U.S., hawkish with negotiators

• The negotiators — Mossad director David Barnea, Shin Bet chief Ronen Bar and Gen. Nitzan Alon — told Netanyahu in Sunday's briefing that they had been negotiating for months and a deal based on his current positions is not possible.
• But Netanyahu continues to argue that if Israel stands firm, Hamas will eventually cave.

State of play: Hamas rejected the latest U.S. proposal on Sunday, blaming Netanyahu's hard lines.

• That was after the White House claimed significant progress was made during talks in Doha last week, and U.S. officials said President Biden wanted a deal by the end of the week.
• Blinken said during a visit to Israel on Monday that Netanyahu had accepted the U.S. proposal and it was now incumbent on Hamas to follow suit.
• That statement baffled some Israeli officials who told Axios that Netanyahu's hard lines are actually making a deal much harder to reach.

Between the lines: Netanyahu endorsed the U.S. proposal — which incorporated several of his updated demands — knowing Hamas would reject it, senior Israeli officials tell Axios.

• His public statement that Israeli negotiators were "cautiously optimistic" about concluding a deal were political posturing, the sources say.
• Any gaps that were narrowed in Doha were between the U.S. and Israeli positions, not Israel and Hamas.
• Despite the optimism from Washington, the Egyptian and Qatari mediators who were providing updates to Hamas didn't believe any real progress was being made, one Israeli official told Axios.
• Israeli negotiators briefed Netanyahu over the weekend that Hamas would reject the deal and claim it represented the positions of Israel, rather than the U.S. On Sunday, Hamas said exactly that.

Zoom in: Two primary roadblocks in the talks are new demands Netanyahu made in recent weeks — that Israel maintain military control over the Philadelphi corridor on the Egypt-Gaza border, and that a mechanism be established to prevent weapons smuggling from southern Gaza to the north. Hamas has rejected both demands.

• Defense Minister Yoav Gallant and the heads of the Israeli security services have concluded they can mitigate the risk of pulling troops out of the Philadelphi corridor, and that establishing such a monitoring mechanism would take months.
• What's more, Gallant and the negotiators told Netanyahu in Sunday's meeting that delaying any deal until those demands are met could endanger the roughly 115 hostages still in captivity and raise the risk of regional war, the Israeli officials said.

• Israeli, Egyptian and U.S. officials met in Cairo on Sunday and Monday to discuss the Phildelphi corridor. On Netanyahu's orders, the Israeli side presented a map that showed Israel reducing some of its forces but still deploying them all along the corridor, the Israeli officials said. The Egyptians rejected that plan.
• "The talks in Cairo were futile. We are definitely stuck," one official told Axios.

Driving the news: Blinken and Netanyahu discussed Gaza for three hours on Monday, with Blinken emphasizing that the U.S. expects progress toward a deal, a source familiar with the meeting said.

• Blinken felt Netanyahu was "constructive" and genuinely wants to move forward with a deal in part because he's concerned about the risk of regional escalation without one, the source said.
• Netanyahu said in a statement that he told Blinken he's committed to the current U.S. proposal, which he stressed takes into account Israel's security needs.

What's next: Netanyahu told Blinken he intends to send the heads of the Israeli negotiating team to a follow-up summit in Cairo later this week, a Netanyahu aide told Axios.

• "What matters is not whether Netanyahu is sending the negotiators, but if he gives them a wide enough mandate to get a deal," an Israeli official said.