‘Tense’ Jerusalem sit-down led to breakthrough in talks, with Israel and Hamas agreeing in principle to hostage deal two days later; sides now finalizing implementation details
A “tense” weekend meeting between Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and incoming Mideast envoy Steve Witkoff led to a breakthrough in the hostage negotiations, with the top aide to US President-elect Donald Trump doing more to sway the premier in a single sit-down than outgoing President Joe Biden did all year, two Arab officials told The Times of Israel on Tuesday.
Witkoff has been in Doha for the past week to take part in the hostage negotiations, as mediators try to secure a deal before Trump’s January 20 inauguration. On Saturday, Witkoff flew to Israel for a meeting with Netanyahu at the premier’s Jerusalem office.
During the meeting, Witkoff urged Netanyahu to accept key compromises necessary for an agreement, two officials on Monday told The Times of Israel on condition of anonymity. Neither Witkoff nor Netanyahu’s office responded to requests for comment.
On Monday night — two days after the Jerusalem meeting — Israeli and Hamas negotiating teams notified mediators that they accepted the hostage deal proposal in principle, the two Arab officials said. The sides have since been working to finalize the details regarding implementation of the agreement.
One of the main issues that has yet to be finalized is the exact parameters of the IDF’s withdrawal from the Gaza Strip, with mediators still waiting for a map from Israel laying this out, the Arab officials said.
The two officials speculated that a deal would be announced on Wednesday or Thursday in the form of a joint statement from the US, Qatar and Egypt, who have been mediating between Israel and Hamas.
Earlier Tuesday, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken claimed that Israel had accepted the deal to free the remaining 98 hostages, while Hamas had yet to do the same.
One of the Arab officials said that the three-phased hostage deal currently being finalized between Israel and Hamas is largely the same as the proposal that was proposed by Israel last May.
“A deal could have been reached much earlier, but both sides led to talks falling apart at various times,” the Arab official said.
The official rejected repeated assertions from the US that Hamas has been the only obstacle to a ceasefire, arguing that Israel has also thwarted talks over the past several months. The Arab official said Netanyahu walked away from the phased proposal he authorized in May, trying to instead prioritize the first phase of that offer so that Israel could resume fighting in Gaza immediately afterward.
Now both parties have agreed to once again get behind the phased framework and are doing so simultaneously — arguably for the first time, the Arab official said.
While the deal has three stages, the terms of the second phase will not be negotiated until the first phase is underway.
During the 42-day first phase, 33 of the remaining women, children, elderly and severely ill hostages will be released in exchange for roughly 1,000 Palestinian security prisoners. Israel will partially withdraw from Gaza, while helping facilitate the entry of 600 trucks of humanitarian aid into the Strip each day.
The second stage will see the release of the remaining living hostages and conclude with a declaration of a permanent end to hostilities. The third phase will see the release of bodies still held by Hamas.
On the 16th day of the first phase, negotiating teams will begin holding talks regarding the terms of the second phase. Those talks will also focus on frameworks for the post-war management of Gaza.
The Biden administration had been pressing Israel to conduct such planning ahead of time, arguing that failing to do so or advance a viable alternative to Hamas risked scuttling military gains. Netanyahu largely resisted, arguing such planning was futile while Hamas is still operational and also rejecting the US preference for the West Bank-based Palestinian Authority to replace the terror group in Gaza.
Not wanting to wait any longer, Blinken on Tuesday gave a speech unveiling a blueprint for the “day after” in Gaza that he hopes the parties will adopt.
While the Biden administration has given Israel significant military support since the start of the war sparked by Hamas’s October 7 onslaught, it has struggled at times to influence Israel’s prosecution of the conflict and its conduct at the negotiating table.
Biden officials point to their success in convincing Netanyahu to allow aid into Gaza after a siege was imposed around the Strip for weeks after the Hamas attack. But the flow of aid plummeted repeatedly throughout the past year, with Blinken asserting all Gazans face food insecurity.
In October, Blinken and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin sent a letter to their Israeli counterparts warning that failure to implement a series of steps to alleviate the humanitarian crisis within 30 days risked the continued supply of offensive weapons to Israel. Israel failed to meet many of the demands listed in the letter by the conclusion of the deadline — which came shortly after Vice President Kamala Harris lost the presidential election to Trump — but the US said it was satisfied with the progress Jerusalem had made on enough of the requests.
Last spring, the US leaned hard on Israel not to “smash” into Gaza’s southernmost city of Rafah, where over one million displaced Palestinians were sheltering.
Biden in May announced a decision to withhold a shipment of 2,000-pound bombs amid fears that Israel would use them in Rafah, leading to a high number of civilian casualties in the fighting.
Biden officials say they succeeded in convincing Israel to alter its military plans in a way that accounted for civilians by directing them toward the coastal humanitarian zone, with much of Rafah flattened in the offensive that followed, which included the killing of Hamas leader and October 7 mastermind Yahya Sinwar as well as the destruction of smuggling tunnels along the Gaza-Egypt border. Other deliveries of similarly heavy bombs to Israel have proceeded, indicating the shipment of 2,000-pound bombs still being upheld is more of a symbolic measure.
A third Arab official from one of the mediating countries argued that concerns of domestic political pushback in the middle of an election season kept Biden from putting more public pressure on Israel.
He pointed to a meeting Blinken held with Netanyahu in August after which the secretary announced that the Israeli premier had accepted a US bridging proposal for a hostage deal. The Arab official along with a member of Israel’s negotiation team told The Times of Israel that this was emphatically not what had unfolded in the meeting and that Blinken’s comments had thrown a major wrench in that round of talks, which ultimately fell apart.
Blinken told The New York Times earlier this month that Hamas tended to harden its positions at the negotiating table when it noticed daylight between the US and Israel, suggesting that Washington refrained from publicly blaming Netanyahu for the lack of an agreement so as not to further harm the talks.
As reported by The Times of Israel