In the week leading up to Donald Trump’s inauguration, a brief but sloppy food fight broke out between the Trump team and the outgoing Biden administration over who deserves credit for finalizing a cease-fire deal in the Gaza Strip. With the benefit of additional reporting, we can now safely conclude that the agreement was truly a joint venture. The deal likely would not have happened in the absence of the Trump administration’s pressure on all regional actors — Israel as well as Hamas and its benefactors. But that pressure only helped cement the framework that Joe Biden’s administration devised.
Trump’s Middle East envoy, Steve Witkoff, admitted as much. “We had nothing to do with the mathematics behind the prisoner release and the hostage release,” he told Fox News Channel hosts Dana Perino and Bill Hemmer on Wednesday. Those terms, Witkoff added, were set “months ago in the so-called May 27 protocol that was agreed to by Hamas, by the Israelis, and monitored by the United States under the Biden administration.”
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