Inside the Gaza deal: How a New York real estate developer took on Netanyahu and Hamas
After months of false starts and foot-dragging, envoy Steve Witkoff, carrying a message from Donald Trump, broke through the impasse in long-futile ceasefire talks.
It was Saturday, the Jewish Sabbath, when Steve Witkoff, President-elect Donald Trump’s Middle East envoy, sat down with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to deliver a stark message from his boss: It was time for a ceasefire deal in Gaza.
Witkoff, a real-estate developer from New York, told the prime minister choices had to be made and Israel’s negotiators needed the authority to make decisions, a person familiar with his conversations said. If Netanyahu didn’t want to work that way, Witkoff said, everyone should just pack their bags and go home, the person said.
Witkoff delivered the same imperative to Arab mediators. A day earlier in Doha, Qatar, armed with a thick file containing the details of previous rounds of talks, he told them it was time for an agreement, not endless diplomatic back-and-forth, the mediators and the person familiar with the conversations said.
Witkoff, a friend of Trump’s – he was playing a round of golf with him during an assassination attempt in September – was new to diplomacy. But his push was well timed, with both sides more inclined to a deal, and Trump having warned there would be “ALL HELL TO PAY” if there wasn’t one.
That warning was meant for both sides, the person said. “The president has been a great friend of Israel,” Witkoff told the prime minister, the person said, “and now it’s time to be a friend back.” The prime minister’s office said this account doesn’t accurately reflect the conversation.
Another person familiar with the conversation said Witkoff and the prime minister had a respectful conversation and that Netanyahu didn’t agree to anything he hadn’t agreed to previously. The reason the deal happened now was due to Israeli military pressure and American diplomatic pressure on Hamas, the person said.
Immediately after the meeting, Netanyahu sent a key aide and the heads of Israel’s spy agencies to Doha for an intense week of negotiations that brought a deal which had been moribund just weeks earlier back into play.
On Friday, Israel’s cabinet approved the agreement, which would pause the fighting for at least six weeks, swap hostages held in Gaza for Palestinian prisoners in Israel, and open a pathway to ending a 15-month war that spilled over into a regional conflict and had repercussions around the globe.
Arab mediators on Saturday said the ceasefire would come into effect on Sunday at 8.30am local time.
Intensive talks led by senior Biden administration officials had repeatedly failed to end the violence. But even though the terms of the agreement on the table had changed little in eight months, this time was different, as a disparate set of events had primed the parties for the right push.
Israel had killed Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, battered Iran’s regional network of militias, and took out many of Tehran’s air defences before the end of last year, putting it in a much stronger negotiating position.
At the same time, Netanyahu had strengthened his governing coalition, making it less likely to be toppled by right-wing opposition to a deal. And there was a ready framework for an agreement hammered out months earlier by the Biden administration.
Within a few days, Israeli and Arab officials were signalling to Wall Street Journal reporters that there was real progress. On Wednesday, after months of false starts and foot-dragging, negotiators and Trump himself were triumphantly announcing that a deal had been done.
“Well, obviously there is, there’s a different political situation with the US in the transition,” said Jack Lew, President Biden’s outgoing US ambassador to Israel. “There is always an element of uncertainty in a transition, and I think that that element of uncertainty had a positive impact.” The new deal will be implemented in phases, beginning with the exchange of some of the hostages for Palestinian prisoners before moving on to talks over a broader end to the fighting.
It almost stumbled at the end. Negotiators on Tuesday conveyed a final draft to Hamas for approval, people familiar with the talks said. They gave the US-designated terrorist group eight hours to come back with an answer, but long after the deadline Hamas still hadn’t replied, creating a nervous and embarrassing moment after all the positive signalling, one of the people said.
Hamas finally returned to the table, saying it was working through the details and wanted to change some of the agreed-upon items, according to US and Arab officials. US officials said they “held firm,” communicating to Hamas that there would be no further changes.
US and Israeli officials have cautioned that the agreement is still fragile. Almost immediately after the deal was announced, Netanyahu’s office threw it back into uncertainty for two days by accusing Hamas of reneging on key points and, according to Arab mediators in the talks, saying it would keep its troops along Gaza’s border with Egypt for longer than it had agreed.
The next stage of the talks, which will open the discussion over an end to the war, will likely be even more contentious, as Israel and Hamas remain at odds over whether there should be a permanent halt to the fighting.
The president-elect has reassured Israel that if Hamas violates the deal, the US will back an Israeli return to fighting, according to a person close to the Trump team. The US will work to ensure the militant group has no future governing role in Gaza, the person said.
“This is just the beginning,” Qatar’s prime minister, Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani, said on Wednesday while announcing the deal.
The fighting in Gaza was triggered by the Hamas-led October 7, 2023, attack on southern Israel, which left about 1200 dead and some 250 people taken hostage.
More than 46,000 people have been killed in Gaza, according to Palestinian health authorities, who don’t say how many were combatants.
An earlier ceasefire deal in November 2023 released about 100 hostages but quickly collapsed. Negotiators tried to resume talks but were dealing with two sides stubbornly unwilling to re-establish a truce.
Netanyahu, vowing to topple Hamas and kill its leadership, pressed his military campaign. Hamas Gaza leader Yahya Sinwar tried to pull Iran and Hezbollah deeper into the fight and revelled in the growing international pressure on Israel brought about by Palestinian civilians’ suffering.
The deaths “will infuse life into the veins of this nation,” he wrote in one of dozens of notes exchanged with his negotiators.
This week’s agreement echoes a proposal drafted by Israel in May. It called for a first stage with a ceasefire and release of hostages, followed by another stage with talks about an end to the war, according to a copy reviewed by the Journal.
But Netanyahu’s government depended on the support of right-wing allies who threatened to bolt should he move ahead.
At a meeting in July at the Watergate Hotel in Washington, Netanyahu spoke with hostage families pressing for a deal and told them he wasn’t ready to stop the fight.
“If we give up on victory over Hamas, we are all in danger from every front,” Netanyahu said, pounding the table as he spoke, according to a recording reviewed by the Journal.
“This axis,” he said, referring to Hamas and its Iran-led allies, “is eating us.” On October 16, after months of unavailing back and forth in the talks, Israeli troops killed Sinwar. Leadership passed to Sinwar’s younger brother, Mohammed, who recruited new members and scavenged unexploded munitions to keep up the fight.
It took Trump’s re-election to get negotiations back on track. Hostage families had been reaching out to him and his close circle since the summer. They wrote letters and met in person and on Zoom calls with Witkoff, key donor Miriam Adelson, Sen. Ted Cruz (R., Texas) and Trump himself, who frequently voiced support in their plight and grew annoyed with the lack of progress.
“I would say that the president is exasperated,” Witkoff, referring to Trump, told reporters last week at Mar-a-Lago before heading out for Doha for talks.
Meanwhile, in early December, Hamas officials had travelled to Cairo and told Egyptian mediators that some members of the group’s armed wing in Gaza were leaning toward a deal, Arab officials said.
Gathered in a light-coloured brick building in the redeveloped downtown of the Qatari capital, the Israeli and Hamas teams were literally on top of one another, stacked in rooms in the same part of separate floors. The heads of the Qatari and Egyptian teams mediating the talks shuttled messages between them.
A key issue that Witkoff helped overcome in recent days was the concerns among Hamas officials that Israel would return to fighting after getting its most vulnerable hostages back in the first phase, according to the mediators.
Witkoff said if everyone abides by the agreement, then Trump would encourage meaningful negotiations in Phase 2, the person familiar with his conversations said.
The mediators passed those assurances along to Hamas. The militant group, which previously wanted written guarantees that Israel wouldn’t return to fighting, moved forward with Trump’s verbal pledges, mediators said.
After the announcements that a deal had been reached, there was still time for one last argument.
Arab mediators said Hamas insisted on naming some of the Palestinian prisoners who would be released in exchange for the hostages, while Israel pushed to extend the time that its troops would remain in the Philadelphi corridor.
As negotiators scrambled to keep the deal together, Trump weighed in again. “Frankly, it better be done before I take the oath of office,” he said in a radio interview on Thursday.
Hours later, Netanyahu’s office announced that an agreement had been reached. Mediators said nothing of substance in the deal had changed.
Can you imagine sitting down for negotiations and not setting a deadline as this thing has dragged on for 15 months,” the person familiar with Witkoff’s conversations said. “Without a deadline, there would be nothing to shoot for.”
-Carrie Keller-Lynn and Alexander Ward contributed to this article.
Wall Street Journal
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