Whenever any of the actors involved speak to the press, you can be sure they have an agenda: to influence public opinion (their own or of other parties), or to seem more extreme than they actually are at the negotiating table so as to make a solution politically possible, etc.
When reporting on this the press then layers on a nice thick coating of opinion, often basing themselves on other press articles which suffer from the same problem.
No wonder comments on the internet are often of the 'You're an idiot! No you are!' variety. People are trying to reason based on second degree derivatives of the actual situation.