As President Joe Biden announced the ceasefire deal between Israel and Hamas from the White House on Wednesday, he repeated a key detail throughout his address: that the deal accepted today was the same deal he helped put on the table in May.
“This is the ceasefire agreement I introduced last spring,” Biden said, flanked by Vice President Kamala Harris and Secretary of State Antony Blinken. “The road to this deal has not been easy — I’ve reached this point because of the pressure that Israel put on Hamas, backed by the United States.”
It was a clear attempt by Biden to claim credit for the historic agreement forged in Doha, Qatar — a final part of his legacy on his way out of the White House. And it was a bid to take some of the spotlight from President-elect Donald Trump, who declared the deal “could have only happened” because of his involvement.
But experts and Palestinian Americans who have been advocating for a ceasefire for months saw Biden’s speech as an admission that a deal should and could have happened far sooner, a delay resulting in the deaths of thousands more Palestinians, as well as Israeli hostages. And now, as the deal is set to go into effect on Sunday, many worry about how many more lives could still be lost between now and then.
“It’s welcome, of course, and very, very, very long overdue — this could’ve been reached six, seven months ago,” said Khaled Elgindy, an adjunct professor at Georgetown University who helped negotiate deals between Palestinian leadership and Israel in the past.
There is hope the deal can bring relief to the many Palestinians who remain in Gaza, said Yousef Munayyer, head of the Palestine/Israel Program at the Arab Center Washington D.C. and former executive director of the U.S. Campaign for Palestinian Rights.
“Tens of thousands have been killed in the Gaza Strip, and so many more affected in ways that they’ll continue to feel for the rest of their lives, whether illness, injury, loss of their homes or family members,” Munnayer said. “I’m thankful it’s finally here, but it absolutely should not have taken this long — it absolutely was possible much earlier than this.”
The three-phase ceasefire deal promises an end to fighting, Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza, and the release of all remaining Israeli hostages — both alive and the remains of the dead — as well as the release of hundreds of Palestinians detained by Israel. It is nearly identical to an agreement that Biden announced in May that was drafted by Egypt and Qatar, which had been hosting negotiations with Hamas. Hamas had accepted the deal, which also drew the support of the United Nations Security Council.
But by June, talks began to falter when Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu insisted that a deal would not be made until the total destruction of Hamas. Members of his cabinet called the proposal “a victory for terrorism.” Netanyahu further impeded an agreement in late July with the introduction of new conditions to the deal, such as the right for its military to screen all displaced Palestinians returning to northern Gaza and its refusal to withdraw from the Philadelphi corridor, Gaza’s border with Egypt, which both Hamas and Egypt rejected.
In the span since talks fell apart in late July, the overall death toll of Palestinians in Gaza rose from at least 39,000 to 46,707, which includes more than 18,000 children, a likely undercount.
“Why is it that it took eight months after that for there actually to be an agreement? The reason is that on the Israeli side, they were not prepared yet to accept this reality and they wanted to continue doing more destruction,” Muyanner said. “And the Americans were unwilling to press them as necessary.”
Leading up to November election, pro-Palestine advocates, including the “Uncommitted” movement, had pressed the Biden administration and the subsequent Harris campaign to commit to an arms embargo as a way to end the killing in Gaza. Both rebuffed the attempts and doubled down on their willingness to arm Israel, a concession to the pro-Israel lobby that holds considerable influence within the party. Netanyahu, in turn, saw the fraught political moment for the Democrats in an election year as a moment to continue acting with impunity, Munayyer said.
“Netanyahu understood that there was a limit to the extent to which Biden was willing to go to actually press the Israelis at all during an election year, and understood that that gave him the time and space to do anything that he wanted,” he said.
Munayyer worried that in the span between Wednesday and Sunday, Israel would continue its campaign in Gaza. Leading up to the agreement, the Israeli military had ramped up bombings, killing at least 40 people on Tuesday and Wednesday in the lead-up to the deal, including two women and four children. And shortly after the ceasefire announcement, Gaza officials said another Israeli strike killed 12 others on Wednesday in a residential area in northern Gaza.
Israel has a pattern, Munayyer said, of late-hour bombing to empty its stockpiles in anticipation of larger military aid packages from the U.S. In this case, with Israel falling short of its military objective of completely obliterating Hamas, “there may be an urge to do great damage while they can before ceasefire comes in, reacting to that disappointment,” he said.
After a peace agreement was struck between Israel and Hezbollah in November, Israel continued to bomb Lebanon’s south, killing civilians. And at the end of its 2006 war in Lebanon, Israel dropped the vast majority of its 4 million cluster bombs, which are illegal under war conventions, onto southern Lebanon in the final three days of the conflict, according to the United Nations, rights groups, and researchers.
“History is littered with agreements that have never been implemented.”
Should the deal go into effect Sunday as planned, Elgindy worries fighting may resume. He pointed to previous deals brokered between Israel and Palestinian officials that were supposed to deliver lasting peace between the nations, such as the third phase of the Oslo Accords which were supposed to take place in 1998, the Wye River Memorandum, the Roadmap to Peace in Palestine in 2003, the 2005 Agreement on Movement and Access, or from the same year, the Israeli “disengagement” from the Gaza Strip. None of the deals ever came to fruition as intended.
“There are many failures of U.S. diplomacy in the Israel and Palestine arena, but one of the big ones is always implementation — history is littered with agreements that have never been implemented,” Elgindy said. “Especially with Netanyahu still talking in his blustery terms that ‘We’re going to continue to fight until we destroy Hamas.’ That’s just not encouraging and Biden didn’t push back on that, and it’s not clear Trump will either.”
For now, Palestinians in Gaza have taken the news as a much-needed reprieve with thousands taking to the streets to celebrate. Many still lack basic health care and necessities as Israel’s blockades have slowed aid from getting into Gaza.
Reem Abuelhaj, a Pennsylvania organizer with No Ceasefire No Vote PA, a group that had pushed for an arms embargo pledge from the Biden and the Harris campaigns, called the ceasefire deal as “the beginning.” She said she is waiting to see progress such as the complete withdrawal of the Israeli military from Gaza, full humanitarian access into Gaza, full access for journalists, a rebuilding process led by Palestinians, and long-term, aside from the deal, an end of the Israeli occupation in the West Bank. She encouraged Americans to continue applying pressure on the U.S. government to make sure the deal is fully realized.
Abuelhaj, who is Palestinian American, said she and her friends and relatives have been reacting to news of the ceasefire with a sense of “numbness.”
“It’s a hard feeling to describe,” she said. “Along with a feeling of tentative relief, there’s a sense of fear of what might come, and of course of the ongoing, overwhelming grief of what this genocide has brought.”
