The ceasefire between Israel and Hamas is still new and fragile, but the arguments over who should get credit for it — or who should be blamed for it taking so long to achieve — are already heated.
Was recent pressure from President Donald Trump on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu decisive? Or was it Trump’s support for Netanyahu’s resumption of the war earlier this year that mattered, because it forced Hamas to concede more?
Alternatively, has Hamas been completely willing to make a deal like this for a year or more — meaning Israel was the main holdout? Or did newly intense pressure on Hamas from Qatar, Egypt, and Turkey in recent days spur the group into making new concessions?
Does the new ceasefire implicate President Joe Biden for not pushing Netanyahu hard enough? Or is the result functionally the same as the ceasefire reached in January while Biden was still in office — which would mean Israel’s resumption of the war in March, with Trump’s backing, wrecked that previous deal for no good reason?
All these dueling interpretations are floating around, pushed by people with different partisan, national, and ideological sympathies.
But if you look closely, there are some areas of overlap in these narratives — and some revealing discrepancies.
Both Hamas and Netanyahu shifted on key points
For two long years, intermittent ceasefire talks have failed (or have eventually fallen apart) due to the inability of Israel and Hamas to agree on the timing and substance of several issues. When would Israel withdraw troops and truly agree to end the war? When would Hamas return the hostages, and in return for which Palestinian prisoners held by Israel? What would a postwar Gaza look like — and would Hamas agree to disarm and relinquish power to others?
Netanyahu’s critics claim that he was the one who repeatedly rejected or sabotaged efforts to end the war. Hamas, they argue, has long been willing to return its remaining hostages in return for Israel ending the war, but Israel kept refusing, for two long years, in favor of further attacks and immense suffering for Gazan civilians. This was, they say, at least in part because Netanyahu faced domestic pressure from his far-right coalition partners, who could remove him from power — and because he faced personal legal jeopardy if he was removed from office. According to this viewpoint, Netanyahu would only agree to end the war if a more powerful party — the United States — essentially forced him.
Netanyahu’s defenders, meanwhile, have argued that the war was meant to ensure nothing like the horrors of October 7 could happen again, and therefore ultimately served Israel’s best interests. Crucial to this, they have said, was removing Hamas from power and disarming the group. Unless that goal was achieved, they insisted, there could be no acceptable peace. It was Hamas that kept refusing to accept this — and only military degradation and defeat, as well as the weakening of its backers abroad (namely Iran and Hezbollah), would compel Hamas to compromise.
Though these narratives differ in emphasis, moral valence, and blame-casting, they essentially agree on the core point: that the war continued for so long primarily because Netanyahu hoped further Israeli military force in Gaza and elsewhere could push Hamas to make greater concessions or defeat them entirely. Ending the war required either Netanyahu or Hamas — or both — to shift.
And leading up to the ceasefire deal, both did shift.
Hamas agreed to release all remaining living hostages without a timeline for a full Israeli troop withdrawal, something the group had long been deeply reluctant to do. They made good on that promise: the hostages have been freed, but only after a partial Israeli troop withdrawal (Israeli forces still control about 53 percent of Gaza; further phases of the peace deal call for them to pull back further).
Netanyahu, meanwhile, agreed to the ceasefire even though Hamas has not been fully defeated — and despite his deep skepticism that Hamas will actually disarm and hand over power, as the deal stipulates. Indeed, Hamas’s acceptance of the deal contained several caveats, and this week’s scenes of Hamas fighters publicly executing purported collaborators in Gaza City have deepened doubts about the group’s commitment to disarmament.
Multiple reports suggest that a crucial turning point in negotiations was Israel’s unsuccessful attack on Hamas negotiators in Qatar last month, which seems to have shaken up the dynamic of the war.
Before then, Netanyahu had kept expanding the war with bold operations across the region, seemingly with success after success: the killing of a Hamas leader in Iran, the pager attacks and strikes against Hezbollah, and the “12-day war” against Iran this June.
But the Qatar strike signaled an end to this run of success. It failed to kill its targets, and only succeeded in absolutely infuriating Qatar, other Gulf nations — and, most importantly, Trump.
Eight months earlier, during the transition from the Biden administration, Trump played a role in crafting what turned out to be a short-lived ceasefire deal. Then, when Netanyahu abandoned the ceasefire in March, Trump backed him, giving him free rein, and even joining in on Israel’s attack on Iran.
It turned out, though, that the Qatar strike went too far for Trump, given his good relations with the Gulf nations and interests (both diplomatic and financial) in the region. Rather than weaken Hamas, the attack seems to have spurred Trump to intensify his efforts to bring the war to a close.
To do so, Trump turned up the heat on Netanyahu, squeezing him both publicly and privately. A source told Axios that Trump called Netanyahu and told him the Trump peace plan was “take it or leave it” — but that “leave it means we walk away from you.”
This story makes Trump look bold and decisive. But was Trump truly prepared to walk away from support for Israel or its war, and was Netanyahu truly cowed by his threats?
An alternative interpretation is that, after two years of grueling war, Netanyahu, and his country, were ready to wrap things up. By all of those attacks — leading up to last month’s Qatar strike and the renewed offensive in Gaza City — Netanyahu assured Israelis, and particularly his far-right coalition partners, that he’d waged the war as aggressively as anyone could want. He can also argue that the war was in fact a security success — in that it killed many Hamas leaders and badly weakened the group while scoring devastating blows against Hezbollah and Iran — despite the grave damage to Israel’s international reputation.
Furthermore, Netanyahu’s defenders argue that the new ceasefire agreement is in fact better than anything Hamas previously offered — because it gets the hostages back, while preserving Netanyahu’s flexibility to restart the war if Hamas doesn’t follow through on its commitments — perhaps with help from the US. (Trump threatened Tuesday that if Hamas doesn’t disarm, “we will disarm them.”)
So did this happen solely because Trump twisted Netanyahu’s arm, or because Netanyahu was, now, ready to have his arm twisted? We don’t know for sure, but assessing that would be crucial in trying to assess whether previous tougher pressure from President Biden would have worked to end the war much earlier.
But Netanyahu wasn’t the only one who shifted, of course. Hamas did too.
Hamas’s negotiating strategy had long been to insist on a complete and final end to the war before returning the remaining Israeli hostages, Jeremy Scahill of Drop Site News reports. The group believed the hostages gave them important leverage over Israel and didn’t want to give that leverage up.
In handing over all the hostages right away, Hamas abandoned this leverage.
Indeed, the Wall Street Journal’s Jared Malsin and Summer Said report that Hamas was essentially coerced by Qatar, Egypt, and Turkey into accepting a deal the group didn’t want.
Citing “officials familiar with the discussions,” the Journal reported that the three nations threatened that if Hamas didn’t sign on to the peace deal, “Qatar and Turkey would no longer host the group’s political leadership, and Egypt would stop pressing for Hamas to have a say in Gaza’s postwar governance.”
If this report is correct, Hamas was squeezed. But they were in a position to be squeezed because the group and its allies have indeed been badly weakened by the war.
The killings of top Hamas officials and many rank-and-file soldiers (as well as a great many Gazan civilians), the decimation of Hezbollah, the collapse of Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad’s regime, and the Israeli strikes on Iran all sent the message that no cavalry was coming to save them — and that, if they continued to hold out, things would only get worse.
Hamas, then, agreed to relinquish the hostages, and signed onto a deal that called for its own disarmament, despite misgivings. And the world will soon find out whether that deal sticks.
