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 Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as his scheduled visit to Washington, D.C., next week draws near. 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, Netanyahu visited Israeli troops in the Gaza Strip, 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 Netanyahu to cancel his speech to Congress on July 24 unless he planned to announce an agreement.

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

Adding concessions

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.

But on Wednesday, Netanyahu told the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, that applying more military pressure on Hamas would yield more concessions in negotiations, suggesting that a deal was not imminent.

The Hostages Families Forum, which represents relatives of the abductees, organized rallies at 30 locations across Israel on Wednesday, urging Netanyahu to close a deal.

“Bring everyone back before you fly off for political tours in other countries,” Ella Ben-Ami, whose father, Ohad Ben-Ami, is a hostage, said at the rally in Tel Aviv, video released by the family group showed.

Ohad Ben-Ami is a dual Israeli and German citizen who was taken from Kibbutz Be’eri on Oct. 7 with his wife, Raz Ben-Ami, who was released as part of a temporary cease-fire deal in November.

“Start here at home,” Ella Ben-Ami said. “Earn your citizens’ trust and make this deal happen.”

Yoav Gallant, Israel’s defense minister, told some families of hostages Monday that no security considerations stood in the way of an agreement and that it was crucial to “exhaust all efforts” before Netanyahu’s trip to Washington, according to the Hostages Families Forum. “Afterward, it will be much more difficult and complicated,” Gallant told the families.

Some in Netanyahu’s governing coalition have urged him to oppose a deal with Hamas.

Pressure from the right

On Thursday, one coalition member, Itamar Ben-Gvir, the far-right national security minister, pressed his opposition to a deal during a visit to Jerusalem’s most contested holy site. The hilltop, revered by Muslims as the Aqsa Mosque compound and by Jews as the Temple Mount, has long been a tinderbox for Israeli-Palestinian tensions. Several states condemned his visit, including Jordan, which called it “a provocative act.”

Ben-Gvir said he had gone to the site to pray for the hostages to return home “without a bad deal, without surrender” to Hamas, and called on the government “to add more military pressure” and bar shipments of fuel to Gaza “until victory.”

Netanyahu’s grip on power relies on the support of two far-right parties, including Ben-Gvir’s, that oppose any agreement that would leave Hamas in power in Gaza. Critics say this has made him wary of committing to a deal that might lead to the collapse of his government and early elections that polling suggests he would lose.

Others in Netanyahu’s governing bloc have called on him to resist the political pressures against a cease-fire agreement. The ultra-Orthodox Shas party sent a letter to Netanyahu on Wednesday telling him “not to fear the voices within the coalition who oppose the deal.”

Some of the most persistent pressure for a cease-fire deal has come from world leaders, health organizations and human rights groups, which have condemned Israel’s prosecution of the war in Gaza. The conflict has killed tens of thousands of people and led to widespread hunger and disease, according to health authorities in Gaza.

At a briefing in Washington on Wednesday, a State Department spokesperson, Matthew Miller, told reporters that, given the scale of Palestinian suffering in Gaza, reaching a cease-fire agreement was an “urgent priority.”

Many countries, including the United States, have argued that any hope for a lasting peace in the region depends on the creation of an independent Palestinian state alongside Israel.

But on Thursday, lawmakers in the Knesset approved a resolution declaring that a Palestinian state would pose an “existential threat” to Israel, embracing Netanyahu’s position on the issue. The resolution passed with 68 votes in the 120-member body. Benny Gantz, an opposition leader who quit Netanyahu’s emergency cabinet in June, citing disagreements over the conduct of the war, backed the measure.