Israel and Hamas Agree to Ceasefire Deal, Reportedly with Trump’s Help

At a press conference in Doha, the Qatari capital, Qatari Prime Minister Abdulrahman bin Jassim Al Thani announced that after several weeks of negotiations, Israel and Hamas had come to a ceasefire agreement that will take effect on Sunday, ending an assault that by many estimates has killed well over 100,000 people in Gaza. The first phase will last six weeks and see the release of 33 Israeli hostages and around 1,000 Palestinian prisoners taken after October 7th, alongside increased humanitarian aid into Gaza. Israel has been intentionally starving northern Gaza since September 30th, so any shred of humanity demonstrated by Israel is an increase relative to the desperate, genocidal situation they created in the north.

Israel will also withdraw its forces to areas no more than 700 meters inside of Gaza’s border, will allow civilians to return home in the north and will allow wounded Palestinians to leave to get treatment, reopening the Rafah Crossing into Egypt. Israel agreed to reduce their presence in the Philadelphi Corridor that was a source of plenty of internal disagreements that helped lead to the breakup of Israel’s emergency government, and they will withdraw completely from it no later than the 50th day of the ceasefire.

The second and third phases will be negotiated during the first phase, but according to Al Jazeera, they are understood to be agreed to in principle.

President Joe Biden said that the ceasefire will continue even if negotiations stretch beyond that first phase deadline, and celebrated this announcement, saying that he is handing Trump “a real opportunity” for a better Middle East. Meanwhile, the Washington Post’s Gulf Bureau Chief Susannah George reports that “a diplomat briefed on the ceasefire negotiations between Israel and Hamas credited progress in the talks in part to the influence of President-elect Donald Trump, saying it was ‘the first time there has been real pressure on the Israeli side to accept a deal.’”

This is not the only report that the incoming president pressured Netanyahu to secure a deal right now, as Peter Beaumont detailed for The Guardian.

“What happened,” a senior Israeli government official told Channel 14, regarded as a mouthpiece for Netanyahu, “is that [Trump’s special envoy to the Middle East Steven] Witkoff delivered a stern message from the incoming president of the United States, who unequivocally demanded the deal’s conclusion.”

Writing in the daily newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth this week, Nadav Eyal summed up the situation confronting Israel’s prime minister and his closest aides. “Netanyahu … suddenly came to recognise precisely where it is that they stand with the new American president. They came to realise that Trump speaks at dictation pace, and they will never be able to outflank him from the right. Trump, once again, wants a deal.”

Some may wrongly interpret this as Donald the Dove, a caricature created by Trump’s political instincts who watched a Republican president get sunk by an unpopular war this century. He lied in 2016 and said he opposed the Iraq War from the start, and he has always demonstrated that he understands something the Very Serious defenders of the status quo don’t: Americans are tired of forever war. Trump doesn’t give a shit about the Israeli or Palestinian people or anyone but himself, he’s just smart enough to see how unpopular this war is and what a layup it is for him to do his favorite thing: demand that someone else do work that he can take credit for. Trump should not get credit for helping to end a war his political ally was extending in part for his benefit and whose refugees Trump said he will bar from America.

Biden also shouldn’t get credit for finally doing his job in his last week and still needing the aid of a cretinous man who will come to define a big chunk of his legacy. Both of these presidents helped embolden Netanyahu, and they will forever have Gaza’s blood on their hands.

As Jen Kirby excellently detailed for Splinter in May of last year, there are very basic levers of power within the government that presidents from Ronald Reagan to Dwight Eisenhower to Gerald Ford to George H.W. Bush used to pressure Israel. Biden did not. He did do things like announce delays in shipments of weapons if Israel crossed his mythical red line in Rafah, and then kept shipping them bombs anyway, angering everyone on all sides.

To put my less diplomatic spin on the fundamental realities of the differences in Biden’s strategy that Jen detailed: there is a long tradition in the U.S. government’s Israel policy that even Republicans adhere to, where there is a real red line that is enforced to get Israel to stop blatantly violating international law in Palestine and its surrounding areas for the whole world to see, and force them back to adhering to the longstanding U.S. policy that they are allowed to do it quietly.

Biden seemingly bragged that this was “the ceasefire agreement I introduced last spring,” following up on his and Kamala Harris’s campaign pledge that they were working tirelessly for a ceasefire that until this agreement, they redefined away from the way the rest of the world used that term.

If this is the agreement he introduced last spring, and it took until now to get it done, reportedly with a big assist from the incoming administration, all Biden is doing is admitting that he is either weak or incompetent (or both). Biden was dog-walked by Netanyahu every day since October 7th, as one of Trump’s chief allies knew that the more misery he could impose on Gaza, the more he could help Trump win. Biden knew this and even privately kvetched about it, and yet, didn’t pull levers that Ronald Reagan did when he called Israel’s relentless bombing of Beirut in the 1980s a “Holocaust.” It’s enough to make you question how much of Israel’s depravity Biden truly opposed given his supply of the weaponry for it and his inaction to stop it, all while knowing that his actions aided his political opponent.

The horrific and genocidal path we took to get here aside, this is as good as news gets these days. Whether Trump receives credit for it or not and how much Biden is to blame and how this impacts the world going forward is all secondary to the fact that this benefits the most intentionally immiserated people on the planet starting on Sunday. This is a day that in a world run by actual principled and strong men would have come far sooner, but we live in a broken one where Joe Biden is the president and that is a good thing compared to what is coming next week. This unspeakable horror that fractured the globe and revealed the cynical self-interest of American global “leadership” once and for all is going to hopefully begin winding down on Sunday, but the scars it will leave on the world and the Palestinian people are still open wounds, and the consequences of Israel’s and Biden’s genocidal actions will be felt for decades if not centuries to come.