Inside story

On a deadline: How Biden and Trump brokered hostage deal before ‘all hell’ broke loose

Mediators used framework outlined by outgoing US president and were empowered by Israel’s weakening of Iranian axis, but needed assistance from US president-elect to close the deal

Jacob Magid

Jacob Magid is The Times of Israel's US bureau chief

US President Joe Biden, right, meets with US President-elect Donald Trump in the Oval Office of the White House, November 13, 2024, in Washington. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)
US President Joe Biden, right, meets with US President-elect Donald Trump in the Oval Office of the White House, November 13, 2024, in Washington. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)

To chalk up the hostage release and ceasefire agreement inked Wednesday to the actions of one leader would be to oversimplify a months-long negotiation between Israel and Hamas that had a dizzying number of moving parts.

Unmoved by that reality, US President-elect Donald Trump was quick to declare that he was the one and only causative factor.

“This EPIC ceasefire agreement could have only happened as a result of our Historic Victory in November, as it signaled to the entire World that my Administration would seek Peace and negotiate deals to ensure the safety of all Americans, and our Allies,” Trump wrote in a celebratory post on Truth Social.

Outgoing US President Joe Biden was a bit more diplomatic, while pointing out that the deal reached Wednesday was the “exact” same framework as the one he unveiled in a May 31 speech.

However, he was also willing to note that it was Israel’s successes on the battlefield against Hamas, Iran’s more powerful proxy Hezbollah, and Tehran itself that created the conditions necessary for a breakthrough.

But during the talks, the parties had still appeared stuck in a state of perpetual bloodshed even though Israel had decimated Hamas and just about all of Gaza, and despite the Biden administration’s framework allowing both sides to save face — with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu certain to assert now that the deal allows him to resume fighting after the first phase, and Hamas already characterizing the deal as a permanent end to the war.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (R) and US President Joe Biden (L) meet with families of American hostages at the White House, July 25, 2024. (Amos Ben Gershom/GPO)

Biden had managed to coax Netanyahu to allow aid into Gaza at the beginning of the war, to tailor his plans for a Rafah offensive so as to cause less civilian harm, and to calibrate Israel’s retaliatory strikes against Iran so as to avoid a regional war.

However, his influence over Netanyahu during his final months in office appeared to wane.

In October, the Biden administration gave Israel 30 days to take a series of steps to alleviate the Gaza humanitarian crisis or risk the withholding of US weapons. When the deadline passed and Israel had yet to meet many of those benchmarks, a since-turned lame-duck administration sufficed with saying Jerusalem had made enough progress on its demands to be let off the hook.

And on one of the most critical facets of the war, planning for the postwar management of Gaza, Biden utterly failed to convince Netanyahu to advance a viable alternative to Hamas. Allowing the PA to gain a foothold in Gaza was the linchpin of the outgoing administration’s entire “day after” plan, but it never got off the ground due to Netanyahu’s refusal to get on board. With the “day after” fast approaching, no replacement for Hamas has been set up, and preventing an enduring insurgency will be Trump’s and Netanyahu’s problem to deal with.

Arab diplomats from both mediating countries Egypt and Qatar acknowledged to The Times of Israel that Hamas had periodically been the main obstacle in the hostage talks, but just as often, the barrier was Netanyahu — something Washington never said publicly until after the deal was announced on Wednesday.

Overcoming that obstacle required an American leader whom Netanyahu feared, not one he boasted of having snubbed.

Enter: Donald Trump.

US President-elect Donald Trump flanked by Sen. John Barrasso, Republican of Wyoming, left, and Sen. Shelley Moore Capito, Republican of West Virginia, talks to reporters after a meeting with Republican leadership at the Capitol on Wednesday, Jan. 8, 2025, in Washington. (AP/Jose Luis Magana)

His December 8 threat of “ALL HELL TO PAY” in the Middle East if the hostages weren’t released by his January 20 inauguration was directed at Hamas, but the incoming leader’s ability to influence the Palestinian terror organization, which had almost nothing left to lose, was limited.

Netanyahu, on the other hand, will be needing Trump’s assistance for the next four years, not least with his arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court, which he’s hoping the US will agree to sanction once the president-elect enters office.

Trump dispatched his incoming Mideast envoy, Steve Witkoff, to join the negotiations in Doha last week, and on Saturday, Witkoff flew to Israel to meet with Netanyahu.

Two officials familiar with the meeting told The Times of Israel on Monday the meeting was tense, with Witkoff leaning on Netanyahu to make the compromises necessary for a hostage deal.

The sit-down led to a breakthrough, with two senior Arab diplomats telling The Times of Israel on Tuesday that Trump’s envoy managed to pressure Netanyahu more in one meeting than the Biden administration had all year.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (left) meets US President-elect Donald Trump’s Mideast envoy Steve Witkoff at his office in Jerusalem, January 11, 2025. (Prime Minister’s Office Spokesperson)

Asked about this during a Wednesday press briefing, State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller insisted: “It is not because of pressure… by any party on the government of Israel [in] the last few days that has gotten us to a deal.”

Miller said the breakthrough was because of Hamas’s weakened and isolated position and the fact that its fighters “needed a break” from the fighting.

From temporary to permanent ceasefire

Another senior Biden administration official sought to hash out this argument during a separate briefing with reporters on Wednesday.

The senior Biden aide credited the breakthrough in negotiations to Israel’s September escalation against Hezbollah in Lebanon, which he said Washington fully backed.

Other US officials who spoke with The Times of Israel in recent months, however, acknowledged that Washington did not immediately support Israel’s decision 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, get behind Israel’s campaign against Hezbollah shortly afterward, shelving an initiative for a 21-day ceasefire in Lebanon in late September. Once Israel finished dealing massive blows to Hezbollah two months later, the US brokered a permanent ceasefire between Israel and the Lebanese terrorist organization.

The senior Biden official briefing reporters on Wednesday 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, whereupon the fighting resumed.

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 May.

Negotiations were subsequently held on and off, with Hamas agreeing to the proposal at the beginning of July, while making a series of amendments.

Illustrative: Smoke rises during clashes between gunmen and the Palestinian Authority’s security forces, inside the Jenin refugee camp, on January 12, 2025. (Jaafar Ashtiyeh/AFP)

Netanyahu’s added conditions

The senior US official claimed 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 contradicted 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, Netanyahu proceeded to add conditions regarding Israel’s withdrawal from the Strip, which led to a breakdown in talks, according to Arab, Israeli and US officials at the time.

Speaking shortly before the anonymous US official on Wednesday, Miller became the first US official to acknowledge publicly for the first time that Netanyahu added conditions to prior proposals that hampered negotiations.

For months, Biden officials publicly insisted that Hamas was the main obstacle to a deal, and while they sometimes said “both sides” were not cooperative, they avoided ever singling out Netanyahu.

Israeli, Arab and US officials all told The Times of Israel on condition of anonymity that Netanyahu was also chiefly to blame at times for breakdowns in negotiations, particularly in July when he added conditions to his earlier proposal regarding the withdrawal of Israeli troops from Gaza, which torpedoed the negotiations.

Former members of Israel’s war cabinet Benny Gantz, Gadi Eisenkot and Yoav Gallant have all spoken publicly of this to varying degrees, revealing that Netanyahu’s desire to ensure his coalition would remain intact had harmed efforts to reach a deal. Netanyahu has denied this.

Palestinians gather to receive aid food being distributed along the roadside at the Nuseirat refugee camp in the central Gaza Strip on January 11, 2025 (Eyad BABA / AFP)

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken appeared to suggest earlier this month that the US refrained from publicly criticizing Israel’s role in the talks amid fears that this would lead Hamas to harden its positions.

Miller said Wednesday: “There have been times that Israel has introduced new conditions and new proposals that have made it more difficult to get an agreement.”

“There certainly have been times when we went to the government of Israel and said: ‘We think that you are pushing too hard, and we want you to back down,’” Miller recalled.

However, he asserted that Hamas sometimes did the same thing and that since August, the terror group had been the main obstacle to an agreement. During that month, Hamas decided that it wasn’t going to negotiate at all.

Demonstrators protest against the Israeli government and for the release of Israelis held hostage in the Gaza Strip in Tel Aviv, January 11, 2025. (Avshalom Sassoni/Flash90)

Hezbollah leaves the scene

The US sought to revive negotiations in August, but that 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 said during the separate briefing Wednesday.

“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 kill 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 recalled. The Lebanon deal was reached on November 27.

Hezbollah fighters carry one of the coffins of four fallen comrades who were killed after their handheld pagers exploded, during their funeral procession in the southern suburb of Beirut, Lebanon, September 18, 2024. (Bilal Hussein/AP)

Less than two weeks later, Biden’s top aides traveled to the region to revive the negotiations.

He recalled quickly hitting a wall after Hamas refused to provide a list of the 33 hostages it was prepared to release in the first phase of the deal.

Hamas asked for a one-week ceasefire in order to come up with the list, but Israel and the mediators held firm in their rejection of the idea.

The terror group managed to submit a list at the end of December, which allowed talks to proceed, the senior US official says.

The list is widely reported to not specify which hostages are alive and which are dead, but the official didn’t go as far as to acknowledge this.

Demonstrators react after a ceasefire deal between Israel and Hamas IS announced, during a protest calling for the release of Israeli hostages held in the Gaza Strip in Tel Aviv on January 15, 2025. (Itai Ron/Flash90)

Hamas officials said the group had lost contact with many of those holding hostages and insisted it could not confirm the status of all hostages without a halt of Israeli fire.

Shortly after the list was produced by Hamas, though, Biden’s top advisers traveled to the region to jumpstart and finalize negotiations. On January 5, Brett McGurk arrived back in Doha where he has remained ever since, participating in 18 hours or more of negotiations each day, the US official said.

Over the last several 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.

Hamas tried to add new demands at the last minute, but “we held very firm, and we now have an agreement,” said the US official.

The senior US official appeared to acknowledge that the “natural deadline” created by the January 20 transition between administrations had added a sense of urgency that led the talks to progress, but he insisted that the “catalyst for intensive diplomacy” was Israel’s defanging of Hezbollah in the fall.

The Biden aide appeared to agree with US National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan’s downplaying of Trump’s “all hell to pay” threats if the hostages weren’t released by January 20. “Jake has spoken to this — hell has been paid to Hamas tremendously.

“But I do have to say, if they refused to release the hostages, I think there was a very good chance of the war escalating,” he added, while noting that this would also likely have meant that the hostages would have been killed.

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