Israel-Hamas ceasefire agreement: An unlikely team of US negotiators wrestled to see hostages freed

Israeli officials were scrambling. They had just been told that Steve Witkoff, President-elect Donald Trump’s Middle East envoy, was on his way to Jerusalem. It was Saturday, January 11 - Shabbat - and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government rarely held official meetings on the Jewish day of rest.

They knew little about Mr Witkoff. He was “just some guy sent by Trump” with little experience in diplomacy or the Middle East, a former senior Israeli official said.

But by the time the billionaire real estate developer’s meeting with Mr Netanyahu was over that day, “Bibi had no choice but to say yes very quickly” to the evolving terms of a ceasefire in the war between Israel and Hamas, the former official said, using Mr Netanyahu’s nickname.

Mr Trump’s claim of full credit for the ceasefire and hostage release agreement that - after 14 months of negotiations since the last pause in fighting - is now planned to go into effect Sunday has provoked eyerolls among officials in the Biden administration.

President Joe Biden responded, “Is that a joke?” when reporters asked Wednesday whether he or Mr Trump deserved the plaudits.

Yet Biden officials involved in the effort acknowledged that Mr Trump’s threats and Mr Witkoff’s participation during the final week of negotiations played a major role in bringing across the finish line a deal they had struggled to reach for more than a year.

The Trump team’s participation “has been absolutely critical in getting this deal over the line,” State Department spokesman Matthew Miller told reporters Wednesday, noting that Mr Biden’s term would expire in five days.

“It’s critical that all of the parties to the agreement and the other mediators see that when the United States is in the room making commitments, those are lasting commitments that extend beyond this administration into the next one.”

This account of how incoming and outgoing administration teams with little ideological affinity - and considerable political enmity - embarked on a virtually unprecedented collaboration to seal the ceasefire deal is based on interviews with numerous current and former US, Israeli and Qatari officials, some of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss ongoing sensitive negotiations.

“Steve and I developed a very close partnership, even friendship,” Brett McGurk, the National Security Council official who has headed the Biden team throughout the negotiations, told CNN late Friday.

“I was very grateful that Steve came out to Doha, (Qatar), in these last few days … to actually close this deal and get it done,” he said.

The unlikely cooperation dates to the week after the presidential election, when Mr Trump visited Mr Biden at the White House, a senior administration official said. Mr Biden outlined the ups and downs of the months-long negotiations between Israel and Hamas - mediated by the United States, Qatar and Egypt - as periods of optimism came crashing down when one side or the other dug in their heels.

It was becoming increasingly clear that even if a ceasefire could be agreed before Biden left office, its implementation would take place under the Trump administration. Chances of success depended in large part on the parties knowing that the two administrations were on the same page.

As negotiations continued, Palestinians continued to die in Gaza from Israel’s ongoing military campaign against Hamas and the lack of food, water, fuel and medical care as the enclave remained largely sealed off from humanitarian assistance.

The only other previously negotiated hostage release of some of the more than 250 people taken when Hamas sparked the war with its brutal raid into Israel in October 2023 had been negotiated in late November of that year. Among the 94 captives Israel says remain in Gaza, it is uncertain how many are still alive.

In talks through November and December with Mr Witkoff and Michael Waltz - Mr Trump’s choice for national security adviser - MR McGurk and Mr Biden’s national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, laid out “how significantly this region has changed,” the senior official said of the power balance in the Middle East.

Relentless Israeli military attacks had decimated Hamas as a military force and eliminated most of its leadership. Any hope that Hezbollah, the most powerful of an array of Iran-backed militant groups, would come to its rescue had ended with a punishing Israeli offensive in Lebanon and the US-negotiated ceasefire there in November.

Syria’s pro-Iran government fell weeks later with the dramatic ouster of Bashar al-Assad; allied Iraqi militias had been effectively neutralized. Iran itself had suffered severe losses to its military strength after Israeli responses to two missile and drone attacks.

The new administration, as well as Israel, would have new opportunities in the region, the Biden officials told Mr Waltz and Mr Witkoff.

Mr Trump had made clear that he did not want the Israel-Gaza war on his plate and, through the end of December and beginning of January, repeatedly threatened a steep but unspecified price for failure to end it before he took office. At a January 7 news conference, he said he didn’t want to “hurt” the ongoing negotiations, but that if the deal wasn’t done before his inauguration, “all hell will break out in the Middle East. And it will not be good for Hamas.”

While those threats seemed primarily directed at the militants, his “hell to pay” vow “sounded like it was directed as much towards us as to Palestinians,” the former senior Israeli official said.

Ron Dermer, Mr Netanyahu’s confidant and top strategy adviser who served as Israeli ambassador to Washington throughout the first Trump administration, flew to Florida to touch base with the president-elect six days after his victory. Their meeting was “scheduled for 25 minutes but lasted two hours,” said Dan Diker, president of the Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs.

Mr Trump and Mr Netanyahu most recently spoke on Wednesday, after the ceasefire agreement was announced; Mr Netanyahu’s statement on the call was effusively grateful to Mr Trump and mentioned only at the end that he also spoke to Mr Biden.

“I think Netanyahu doesn’t know” exactly what Trump, who has called himself the most pro-Israel president in U.S. history, would do if Israel were seen as having blocked the deal, said Aaron David Miller, a former State Department official and Middle East negotiator, now at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

The Biden team “did all the negotiating … all the foundational work” towards the ceasefire, he said. “Trump capitalized on Netanyahu’s uncertainty, Hamas weakness and his own unpredictability.”

At the time of Mr Dermer’s visit, the Israelis “were a little concerned whether military assistance” from the United States “would continue,” Mr Miller said.

After stalling out in late December - when Hamas refused to agree to the list of hostages that would be released in the first phase of the negotiating framework on the table - talks resumed in the first week of January, a senior Biden administration official said.

When Mr Witkoff, who had already made one trip to Doha in early January, arrived there for a second time on the morning of January 9, significant progress had been made on the three main components of the deal: the phased release of Israeli hostages in exchange for a set number of Palestinian prisoners; a 42-day ceasefire during which Israeli troops would withdraw from populated areas of Gaza; and a surge in humanitarian aid to Gaza civilians.

For the next seven days, negotiations continued, often for 18 hours a day or more. In a two-story building on the grounds of Qatar’s Foreign Ministry complex, the Americans and Israelis met on the top floor, with Hamas negotiators below them. Qatari and Egyptian officials shuttled up and down between the two groups.

Early in the morning of January 11, Mr McGurk and Mr Witkoff decided to split up the remaining tasks, with Mr McGurk remaining in Doha while Mr Witkoff flew to Jerusalem, representing Mr Trump, to directly ensure Mr Netanyahu’s buy-in.

The stakes were - and remain - astronomical. If Hamas were to refuse to release the hostages, there’s “a very good chance of the war escalating,” the senior administration official said, making it “very likely the hostages would also (be) … lost.”

Mr Witkoff’s argument to Mr Netanyahu “was basically ‘It’s up to you … either you do the ceasefire and we start the relationship, or you don’t do the ceasefire (and) you don’t give the incoming president what he wants. Then we can’t promise we’ll be engaging the way you want us to,’” said a former US intelligence official briefed on the negotiations by US and Arab mediators.

The former official said that a key part of Mr Trump’s leverage is a belief within Israel’s right wing that makes up Mr Netanyahu’s political base that the new US president will be more sympathetic to annexing the West Bank and waging war against Iran.

Though there appears to be final agreement by both sides to the temporary ceasefire and partial hostage release in the first phase of the deal, there is widespread concern - and some specific hints by Mr Netanyahu - that things will fall apart before they reach the planned second phase, the final terms of which are still to be negotiated.

In principle, Hamas is supposed to give up the remaining hostages - many of them Israeli soldiers - and Israel is to withdraw completely from Gaza.

Plans for what the Biden administration has envisioned as a third phase - reconstruction of Gaza and establishment of a Hamas-free government as a prelude to a two-state solution for Israelis and Palestinians - will also be left for Trump, if he chooses to pursue them.

Rubin reported from Tel Aviv and Shih reported from Jerusalem.

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