The agreement on a second truce in Gaza is the result of ‘remarkable’ cooperation between the teams of Joe Biden and Donald Trump, according to a senior US official on Wednesday.
The official, who requested anonymity, lifted a corner of the veil behind the scenes of the fierce negotiations of the last few days.
For example, he recounted how Steve Witkoff, the future Middle East envoy of the Republican president-elect, had travelled four days ago to Doha, Qatar, where the talks were taking place.
He added that he had contributed to the ‘final effort’ alongside Brett McGurk, who occupies the same role in the outgoing Democratic administration.
This collaboration is ‘historically unprecedented’, said the senior American official, praising a ‘very constructive, very fruitful’ partnership between the two men, even to the point of dividing up the work between them.
While Joe Biden's emissary continued to oversee the discussions in Qatar, ‘we wanted to have an exchange with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, (Steve Witkoff) went to Israel to do it and then came back’, recounted the senior US official.
His behind-the-scenes account of the discussions clearly contrasts with the deep political hostility between Joe Biden and Donald Trump.
To reach the agreement announced on Wednesday, it had taken ‘eighteen-hour days’ or more of talks since 5 January, according to the same source.
It described a process of advances and then setbacks over several months, with a relaunch of negotiations from mid-December at the initiative of the United States, and a breakthrough after Christmas, when Hamas agreed to draw up a list of hostages to be released.
In any diplomatic negotiation ‘there are natural deadlines, and the transition from one president to another is one of them’, said the senior US official, five days before Donald Trump is sworn in and returns to the White House.
‘The catalyst for this diplomatic effort was the defeat of (Lebanese) Hezbollah, the ceasefire in Lebanon and the enormous isolation of Hamas,’ he continued, setting the wider context for the agreement.
He described a final round of negotiations that was uncertain right up to the end, with Qatari and Egyptian mediators constantly going up and down the stairs of a building where the Hamas and Israeli delegations were staying, one on the first floor, the other on the second, until late into the night.
Negotiations were pushed to the point of settling ‘every last detail’, he said, whether on the list of prisoners to be released by the Israelis, on the positioning of the Israeli armed forces once the ceasefire came into force, or on humanitarian efforts.
The senior American official assured us that he had not been certain until ‘late afternoon’, Doha time, that this time the agreement would indeed be sealed.
‘Hamas has a tendency to insert new issues, old issues, and they tried to do it again this morning, with three points. But we stood our ground and they finally confirmed their agreement’, he reported.
With AFP.
Comments