The US is pressuring Israel and Hamas to resume talks, a White House official says.

The US government is making an intensive effort to convince Israel and Hamas to resume negotiations so they can resume hostilities and release more hostages, a White House spokesman said on Sunday.

“We’re still working very hard, hour after hour, to see if we can get the parties back to the table and see if we can get something moving,” said John F. Kirby, the strategic communications coordinator at National Security from the White House. Council, said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” “We would like this to happen today. But honestly, I just don’t know.”

During appearances on several talk shows on Sunday, Mr. Kirby insisted that Hamas was responsible for the breakdown of the talks, saying the country had failed to meet the terms of its original agreement to begin extraditing prisoners in Gaza. He said Hamas had failed to draw up a list of women and children to be released, in addition to the 105 hostages freed during the original lull in the fighting. Among the people still being held are eight or nine Americans.

Israel has since resumed its attack on Hamas and Mr Kirby urged the country to avoid civilian casualties while crediting his forces for making efforts to do so. He said Israeli authorities were open to American advice on how to make their attack more precise.

“We believe they have been receptive to our messaging here in terms of minimizing civilian casualties,” he said on ABC’s “This Week.” He noted that Israel had published a map directing citizens to what they believed were safe zones.

“There aren’t many modern armies that would do that, I mean, telegraph their blows like that,” he said. “So they are doing their best.”

President Biden and his administration have tried to toe a careful line nearly two months after the October 7 terrorist attack in which Hamas killed an estimated 1,200 people in Israel and took another 240 hostage. While it supports Israel’s right to defend itself, the administration has also tried to dissuade Israel from what it believes would be going too far in its response.

That sparked criticism from both the left and right on Sunday, as some Republicans complained that Biden’s team was trying to stop Israel, while some liberal Democrats complained that it was not doing so enough.

Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, mentioned Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III. In a speech on Saturday, Mr. Austin warned that Israel must protect civilians in Gaza and prevent violence against Palestinians by Jewish settlers in the West Bank or “replace a tactical victory with a strategic defeat.”

Speaking on CNN’s “State of the Union,” Mr. Graham lambasted Mr. Austin, a retired four-star general who fought in Iraq. “He’s so naive; I mean, I just lost all confidence in this guy,” Mr. Graham said.

“If we were attacked like that, like on September 11, if in two months someone called for us to have a ceasefire against Al Qaeda, we would have laughed them out of town, chased them away. out of town,” Mr. Graham added. “Secretary Austin is telling Israel things that are impossible to achieve.”

Mr. Graham said his solution to the hostage standoff would be to threaten Iran, Hamas’s sponsor. “I would go to Iran and say, listen, you have to tell Hamas to let these hostages go,” he said. “If you don’t, you’re going to pay a higher price.”

On the other end of the ideological spectrum, Representative Pramila Jayapal, Democrat of Washington, said on the same program that the Biden administration had a responsibility to prevent Israel from killing so many civilians.

“The United States cannot support this kind of indiscriminate bombing – that is my firm belief,” she said. “We must impose conditions on military aid, just as we do for any other country.”

While the White House blamed Hamas for the failure of the hostage talks, Ms. Jayapal blamed Israel.

“Qatar has said that Hamas is still at the table,” she said, referring to the Persian Gulf emirate that has served as an intermediary for the talks. “Israel still needs to have a seat at the table. Some Israeli hostages even say that Israel should still have a seat at the table because these are complicated negotiations and will only happen if both sides are willing to reach some kind of agreement.”