Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office denied agreeing to a French and American proposal for a 21-day cease-fire on the border with Lebanon, as he was en route to the U.N. General Assembly on Thursday.

Israel has not reached a cease-fire agreement, Netanyahu spokesman Omer Dostri said, calling it “an American-French proposal that the prime minister has not even responded to.” 

Dostri also said that reports that Israel was scaling down its strikes in Lebanon are “the opposite of the truth. The prime minister instructed the IDF to continue fighting at full force.”

The Biden administration on Wednesday announced an effort to negotiate a 21-day cease-fire on the Israel-Lebanon border, in the hopes that a short-term agreement will allow time for the parties to reach a long-term deal to end the fighting on Israel’s northern border and allow Israeli and Lebanese civilians to return home.

“The exchange of fire since Oct. 7th, and in particular over the past two weeks, threatens a much broader conflict, and harm to civilians,” President Joe Biden and French President Emmanuel Macron said in a statement on Wednesday night. “We therefore have worked together in recent days on a joint call for a temporary ceasefire to give diplomacy a chance to succeed and avoid further escalations across the border.” 

The statement does not mention Hezbollah, the Iran-backed, Lebanon-based terrorist group that has fired approximately 9,300 missiles at Israel since Oct. 8, a day after the Hamas terror attacks killed more than 1,200 people in Israel. Hezbollah has killed 49 Israelis and wounded over 370. The government of Israel evacuated 63,500 people from towns closest to the border and thousands more have left their homes. 

Earlier this month, the cabinet added their safe return to their homes to its war aims. Since then, the White House has sought an elusive diplomatic agreement between Israel and Lebanon. The renewed fighting between Israel and Hezbollah in recent days has added an urgency to the Biden administration’s push for a negotiated resolution. More than 600 people have been killed in Israeli strikes on Hezbollah targets in Lebanon in recent days, according to the Lebanese health ministry. 

Neither Israel nor Lebanon has yet agreed to the agreement, but both parties have been part of U.S.-led conversations on the potential deal, a senior Biden administration official said. The official added that they trust Hezbollah would abide by its terms — the signatory would be the Lebanese government, in which Hezbollah has seats.

“We have had this conversation with the parties, and felt this was the right moment to answer the call based on our discussion. They are familiar with the text, and again, we’ll let them speak for their actions of accepting the deal in the coming hours,” the official said. “This has been an all-out effort by the administration to reach this moment we have. We’re grateful to both the Israelis and the Lebanese government in working tirelessly to get to this moment.”

The announcement of the cease-fire push was endorsed by the governments of the U.S., Australia, Canada, the European Union, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar.

“The situation between Lebanon and Israel since Oct. 8th, 2023 is intolerable and presents an unacceptable risk of a broader regional escalation. This is in nobody’s interest, neither of the people of Israel nor of the people of Lebanon,” the nations said in a joint statement, which did not mention Hezbollah, either.

The endorsement statement mentioned that the 21-day cease-fire would be a time to negotiate a longer-lasting one that would be consistent with U.N. Security Council Resolution 1701, reached at the end of the 2006 Second Lebanon War, which entails U.N. forces keeping Hezbollah north of the Litani River, about 18 miles north of the border.

The Biden administration official stressed that a short-term cease-fire cannot be the final agreement to this conflict because it doesn’t address Israel’s long-term security needs.

“It was always going to have to be more than just a cease-fire because it would be unacceptable for Israeli residents to return to their homes in the north if there weren’t security arrangements on the Lebanese side that prevented Hezbollah from sitting on the border, and ensuring that they were secure from an Oct. 7-like attack in the future,” the senior official said.