From the Liveblog of
Thursday, January 16, 2025
US official says Biden prioritized Israel’s ‘defanging’ of Hezbollah to push Hamas toward deal
Jacob Magid is The Times of Israel's US bureau chief
A senior Biden administration official says the US shifted its approach to the Gaza war in August, prioritizing the support of Israel “defanging” Hezbollah amid stalled negotiations for a hostage deal based on the belief that doing so would further isolate Hamas and lead the terror group to show more flexibility in the ceasefire talks.
The senior US official briefing reporters from Qatar tries to frame the Biden administration’s role as essential for bringing about the deal, but other US officials who have spoken with The Times of Israel in recent months have acknowledged that Washington did not immediately back Israel’s decision in September to massively escalate its military operations against Hezbollah. The US officials said that Israel did not give Washington a heads-up before conducting the mass detonation of communication devices that wounded thousands of Hezbollah operatives or before the IDF conducted an airstrike that killed the terror group’s leader Hassan Nasrallah.
The US did, however, begin supporting Israel’s campaign against Hezbollah after-the-fact, shelving an initiative for a 21-day ceasefire in Lebanon in late September. Once Israel finished dealing massive blows to Hezbollah group two months later, the US brokered a permanent ceasefire between Israel and the Lebanese terrorist organization.
The senior Biden official briefing reporters harkened back to the first hostage deal in November 2023, which fell apart after a week when Hamas walked back on commitments to release a number of female hostages, leading the fighting to resume.
The US sought unsuccessfully to secure short-term hostage release and ceasefire deals in the months that followed before settling on the staged framework in the spring of 2024.
The ceasefire and hostage release deal inked Wednesday is based on an Israeli proposal submitted on May 27, which was unveiled by Biden in a White House speech four days later, the senior US official says.
Negotiations were held on and off, with Hamas agreeing to the proposal at the beginning of July, while making a series of amendments.
The senior US official claims that the Hamas response was one that no Israeli government could have accepted as it was effectively an “all for all” deal that required Israel to fully withdraw from Gaza, while leaving Hamas in power. This contradicts what Israeli and Arab officials familiar with the talks have said about the Hamas offer, arguing that it was not a drastic departure from Israel’s earlier proposal.
Moreover, Israel’s negotiating team of security chiefs urged the government to accept the Hamas response at the time. However, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu proceeded to add conditions regarding Israel’s withdrawal from the Strip, which led talks to breakdown, Arab, Israeli and US officials said at the time.
The US sought to revive negotiations in August, but that months-long effort fell apart after Hamas executed six hostages — including American-Israel national Hersh Goldberg-Polin — as their captors feared that IDF troops were approaching the tunnel where they were held in southern Gaza’s Rafah, the senior US official says during the briefing.
“After that, we really shifted our focus, and the strategy became… the campaign in Lebanon to defang Hezbollah,” the senior US official says. “We supported the Israelis… because as long as Hezbollah was saying it would continue to [maintain] another front against Israel… Hamas was not really under enough pressure and isolation to do the deal and release the hostages.”
It was around this time that Israeli forces managed to killed Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar in Gaza.
The senior official told reporters that already in August when the hostages were executed, the US “basically concluded that as long as Yahya Sinwar was alive, we were not going to get a deal.”
This conclusion was also what led to the shift in focus to wrapping up the northern front.
Once Israel completed many of its operational goals against Hezbollah in October, Biden’s top aides returned to the region and met with Netanyahu, who agreed to work toward a US-brokered ceasefire in Lebanon, which could then be dovetailed with a ceasefire in Gaza, the senior official recalls. The Lebanon deal was reached on November 27.
Less then two weeks later, Biden’s top aides traveled to the region to revive the negotiations and largely remained in the area until the deal was reached Wednesday.
Last week, White House Mideast envoy Brett McGurk was joined by US President-elect Donald Trump’s Mideast envoy Steve Witkoff in Doha. Their partnership was “crucial” to securing the hostage deal, says the US official briefing reporters.
Arab officials familiar with the talks told The Times of Israel it was Witkoff’s Saturday meeting with Netanyahu that led to a breakthrough in talks, with the Trump envoy leaning harder and more effectively on Netanyahu in one sitting than the Biden administration had all year.
Over the last few days, negotiations were taking place at a building in Doha, with the Israeli and American teams on the second floor, the Hamas team on the first floor and the Egyptian and Qatari teams shuttling between them, the senior US official adds.
Hamas tried to add new demands at the last minute, but “we held very firm, and we now have an agreement,” the official says.
