Pressure Builds on Netanyahu as Visit to Washington Nears

World leaders are pushing for a cease-fire agreement. Protesters are taking to the streets across Israel. And families of hostages are pleading with their country’s leader to just make a deal for their release.

The pressures are piling up on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ahead of his scheduled visit to Washington next week. His speech before a divided Congress figures to be contentious, particularly if he cannot close a deal with Hamas to end the war before he travels.

On Thursday, Mr. Netanyahu visited Israeli troops in Gaza, near the border with Egypt, and told them that continued military pressure on Hamas was “helping us, together with the steadfast insistence on our just demands, to advance the hostages deal.”

Yair Lapid, the leader of Israel’s parliamentary opposition,has called on Mr. Netanyahu to cancel his speech to Congress on July 24 unless he planed to announce an agreement.

“He needs to declare a hostage deal without inventing conditions or raising obstacles every 10 minutes,” Mr. Lapid said on Israeli news radio, alluding to reports that Mr. Netanyahu had complicated the negotiations by adding conditions that Hamas would most likely resist.

Mediators in Qatar and Egypt have been negotiating over a framework for a deal that would stop the fighting and return about 120 people — it is not clear how many are alive — taken hostage in the Oct. 7 Hamas-led attack on Israel, among other terms.