Netanyahu said it was "exactly inaccurate" that an agreement on a cease-fire in Gaza deal was close to reaching a breakthrough.

"There's not a deal in the making," Netanyahu said Thursday in an interview on "Fox and Friends."

His public skepticism comes as U.S. officials said they were working on a revised proposal to address remaining disputes between Israeli and Hamas after the weekend discovery of six dead captives added urgency to the talks.

National security spokesman John Kirby reiterated Thursday that only disagreements on “implementing details” of a ceasefire proposal need to be hammered out.

“I’ve heard what the prime minister said. I’m not going to get into a back and forth with him in a public setting," Kirby told reporters. “We still believe, though this is incredibly difficult ... if there’s compromise, if there’s leadership, we can still get there.”

President Joe Biden's team, a lame-duck administration two months before the election, has projected optimism this summer as it works with fellow mediators Egypt and Qatar to try to get Israel and Hamas to agree to a truce in the 11-month war in Gaza. The deal would release more of the captives held in Gaza, including Americans, in exchange for Palestinian prisoners.

U.S. officials said in the days before Israeli forces recovered the bodies of six captives, including Israeli-American Hersh Goldberg-Polin, that Israeli and Hamas leaders could sign off on a deal as soon as the end of this week.

“I’m optimistic. It’s far from over. Just a couple more issues. I think we’ve got a shot,” Biden told reporters last Friday.

Even before that, Netanyahu was digging in his heels, adding conditions that make sealing any agreement before the U.S. elections difficult. His far-right government publicly prioritized for the first time in July — months into the talks — a demand for Israeli forces to keep their presence in a buffer zone along Gaza’s border with Egypt. Netanyahu claims it's needed to prevent Hamas from smuggling arms into the Palestinian territory.

“To ask Israel to make concessions after this murder is to send a message to Hamas: Murder more hostages, you’ll get more concessions,” Netanyahu said Thursday. "That’s the wrong thing to do, and I think the Israel public overwhelming is united against that.”

Captives families have accused Netanyahu of blocking a deal and potentially sacrificing their loved ones to hold the border strip, called the Philadelphi corridor. Hundreds of thousands of Israelis have taken to the streets, calling for a deal and saying time is running out to bring home the captives alive.

Netanyahu has brushed off criticism that his management of the war and cease-fire negotiations has been politically motivated and said he believes only heavy pressure on Hamas will force it into concessions.

The Biden administration has stressed that its ally Israel has supported the negotiations and Hamas has been blocking a deal. This week, however, Biden said “no” when asked if Netanyahu was doing enough in the talks.

Hamas called on the United States Thursday to "exert real pressure" on Israel to reach a Gaza ceasefire agreement.

Hamas's Qatar-based lead negotiator Khalil al-Hayya called on the US to "exert real pressure on Netanyahu and his government" and "abandon their blind bias" towards Israel.

The U.S., Egypt and other Arab nations have raised objections to a lasting Israeli presence in the Philadelphi corridor. Hamas says the Israeli position is in breach of the bridging proposal’s call for Israel to leave densely populated areas of Gaza.

U.S. officials say Israeli officials, including Netanyahu, have been more agreeable to negotiations in private discussions than in their public statements.

A senior U.S. administration official told reporters Wednesday that Israel and Hamas have agreed on 14 of the 18 paragraphs in the bridging proposal, have technical differences about one paragraph and deeper differences about three paragraphs.

The official spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the negotiations.

Those three paragraphs in question focus on the exchange of captives captured by Hamas and the number of Palestinian prisoners who would be released during what is supposed to be at least a six-week cease-fire.

The list of Palestinian prisoners to be released in the initial phase of the deal includes some who are serving life sentences in Israeli prisons. The official said the dispute about the ratio of prisoners to captives to be swapped has been further complicated by the recent deaths of the six captives .

For each captive , there’s a certain number of Palestinian prisoners that were to be released. Now, “you just have fewer hostages as part of the deal in phase one,” the official said.

Netanyahu said they are still discussing the number of prisoners to be released for each captive, the list of prisoners to be freed and whether they will be allowed to return home or have to leave.