After fifteen months of bloodshed, negotiators have announced a ceasefire deal between Israel and Hamas with the hope that the pause will blossom into a more permanent peace. Outgoing President Joe Biden announced the deal, taking partial credit for the arrangement, which the United States (along with Egypt and Qatar) will oversee as formal guarantors.
“It is a very good afternoon,” Biden said. “The road to this deal has not been easy.” Let’s take a look at what we know about the deal’s specifics.

The structure of the deal

The ceasefire deal is built around three distinct phases. The first phase includes “a ceasefire, a gradual withdrawal of Israeli troops from central Gaza, the return of displaced Palestinians to northern Gaza, admittance of humanitarian aid into Gaza, Hamas’s release of 33 hostages (including two Americans), and Israel’s release of hundreds of Palestinian prisoners,” Tangle reported.

The finer points of the second phase are still being negotiated. But we can expect the second phase to include the “release of all remaining living hostages to Israel, a permanent ceasefire, and Israel’s total withdrawal from Gaza.” The third phase includes the return of deceased hostage remains to Israel and the longer-term reconstruction of Gaza, which the conflict has left smoldering.

Biden’s goodbye

The deal coincides with Biden’s exit from office—which draws an unusual parallel to the Carter-Reagan transition and the Iranian hostage crisis (which we covered recently here); although, with Iran, President Jimmy Carter failed to secure the hostage release, whereas incoming President Ronald Reagan secured the hostage release on his first day in office.
Incoming President Donald Trump, who sent an envoy to participate in the negotiations, is unsurprisingly taking credit for the timing of the deal. Posting on Truth Social, Trump wrote: “This EPIC ceasefire agreement could have only happened as a result of our Historic Victory in November…We have achieved so much without even being in the White House.”

Trump’s bravado can be easy to dismiss as hot air, but there may be some truth to the claim that his negotiating team, or the simple reality of his impending inauguration, incentivized the belligerents to strike a deal. According to Yair Rosenberg, writing for The Atlantic, Trump did indeed make the deal happen. “Hamas could reasonably surmise that it would not get a better deal during Trump’s presidency,” Rosenberg wrote, “while Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s hard-right government likely acceded to the arrangement in order to stay in the new leader’s good graces as he assumed office.”

Biden, for his part, made a broader assessment of the ceasefire, citing multiple factors, including the “extreme pressure that Hamas has been under,” the “weakening of Iran,” and the “dogged and painstaking American diplomacy.”

The deal marks the end of Biden’s remarkable fifty-year career in Washington politics; the elder statesmen will relinquish the presidency to Trump on Monday.

Harrison Kass is a senior defense and national security writer with over 1,000 total pieces on issues involving global affairs. An attorney, pilot, guitarist, and minor pro hockey player, Harrison joined the US Air Force as a Pilot Trainee but was medically discharged. Harrison holds a BA from Lake Forest College, a JD from the University of Oregon, and an MA from New York University. Harrison listens to Dokken.

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