Biden or Trump: which president will get credit for Gaza truce?

The finalising of the ceasefire deal owes much to the impending transfer of power from Joe Biden to Donald Trump, sparking a pointed debate over who deserves the credit.

The finalising of the ceasefire deal between Israel and Hamas owes much to the impending transfer of power from President Biden to President-elect Donald Trump, sparking a pointed debate over who deserves the credit.

Though the emerging deal is the product of months of on-and-off talks, the approaching change of US administration has served as an unofficial deadline for cementing the accord, current and former US officials say.

“WE HAVE A DEAL FOR THE HOSTAGES IN THE MIDDLE EAST. THEY WILL BE RELEASED SHORTLY. THANK YOU!” Trump announced Wednesday on Truth Social, his social-media platform.

Biden will likely address the ceasefire in a previously scheduled Oval Office speech scheduled for Wednesday night, described by the White House as a farewell address.

“There’s nothing like the end of a presidency to say this is a real deadline and if we’re gonna do anything we better do it now, because God knows what happens after the 20th,” said John Bolton, who served as national security adviser during Trump’s first term as president.

Israel, for its part, is increasingly focused on reining in Iran’s nuclear program and well aware that both Biden and Trump support sealing the Gaza deal over the next week.

The scramble over which American president deserves the plaudits has begun in Washington and will only intensify as the initial release of nearly three dozen hostages and a 42-day ceasefire takes place.

Donald Trump has taken credit for the expedited peace deal. Picture: AFP

Biden’s aides say the accord was based on a framework their boss outlined last May and which he and his aides have pursued for months. On Tuesday, Biden kept up the effort, speaking with Egyptian President Abdel Fattah Al Sisi in a call that followed similar conversations in previous days with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the emir of Qatar, Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani.

Trump’s supporters say it was the incoming president who boosted the prospects for the deal. He promised on December 2 last year there would be “ALL HELL TO PAY” if Hamas did not release the remaining hostages by Inauguration Day.

Two days earlier, Egypt let Israel know that Hamas was seriously willing to negotiate a ceasefire, an Israeli official said. Plans to restart dormant negotiations grew from there, though the official added that Trump’s threats “added more fuel to the fire”.

Middle East analysts and even some Biden administration officials argue the combination of Democratic and Republican efforts appear to have brought the talks to the finish line.

“There is the Trump effect,” said Dennis Ross, who served as a senior official on Middle East issues during Democratic as well as Republican administrations. “It is not his threats that affected Hamas but his emphasis on ending this before he became president that did influence the Qataris, Egyptians, and quite possibly the Turks – and they individually and collectively have the ability to pressure Hamas.”

Netanyahu, Ross added, doesn’t feel he can go against Trump, giving the incoming president leverage in the relationship at the start of his second term. “But the Biden team deserves credit for basically helping to craft the deal,” he said.

The potential breakthrough amid a US presidential transition recalls the 1981 agreement that freed the American hostages in Iran when another Democratic president was transferring power to a Republican successor. Taken hostage during the Carter administration when the US Embassy was overrun in Tehran in 1979, the 52 hostages weren’t released until President Reagan was giving his inaugural address.

As with the more than four-decade-old Iran hostage crisis, the widely anticipated Gaza accord comes as the US is in the midst of a political transition. But there are some noteworthy differences between the two crises.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu meets US President-elect Donald Trump's Mideast envoy Steve Witkoff at his office in Jerusalem.

A big distinction is the co-operation between the Biden and Trump teams – particularly the participation of Steve Witkoff, Trump’s Middle East envoy – in the Gaza negotiation.

“This is not like Carter and Reagan – there was no real co-operation there and Khomeini wanted to humiliate Carter by not releasing the hostages until after Reagan was sworn in,” Ross added, referring to Ruhollah Khomeini, the Iranian ayatollah who led Iran at the time.

Another distinction is that the potential Gaza accord is just one step toward a definitive and more challenging resolution of the crisis, which would require agreement on who would govern, secure and rebuild Gaza if and when Israeli troops leave.

“There was tremendous co-operation here between Trump and Biden,” said Aaron David Miller, a former US Middle East negotiator who is a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “But this is not a resolution of the issue. There’s no Hollywood ending here.”

In a Tuesday appearance at the Atlantic Council, Secretary of State Antony Blinken pointed to formidable obstacles that lie ahead, including he said a pathway for the Palestinians to have a state of their own.

“For many months, we’ve been working intensively with our partners to develop a detailed post-conflict plan that would allow Israel to fully withdraw from Gaza, prevent Hamas from filling back in, and provide for Gaza’s governance, security, and reconstruction,” said Blinken. “We will hand it off to the Trump administration to carry forward.”

The current and incoming national security advisers sat next to each other at an event hosted Tuesday by the US Institute of Peace, a Washington-based research centre, signalling the close co-ordination during the transition.

But it was still not clear how much agreement there is between the departing and incoming administrations on the next steps to stabilise the Middle East, including policy toward Iran, Syria, and the Palestinians.

Even carrying out a more limited Gaza ceasefire, Biden national security adviser Jake Sullivan observed, would be full of challenges. While he expressed hope that a deal would be reached before January 20, he cautioned “then there’s the actual implementation and execution of that”.

Incoming Trump national security adviser Mike Waltz, previewing how the next administration sees the problem, said it was imperative to get a resolution of the Gaza conflict and encourage a “finally reformed” Palestinian Authority.

But he expressed scepticism about the ability to moderate extremist movements in the region. “Hopefully you can reform the next generation,” he said, “but sometimes you just have to put bombs on foreheads.”

The Wall St Journal