Hamas agreed to the terms of the current Gaza ceasefire deal more than a year ago, but at the time, the potential agreement was rejected by both Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and then-US President Joe Biden, according to an Israeli involved in the negotiations.
“What we should also know is that this deal could have been done a long time ago. Hamas agreed to all the same terms in September 2024, as outlined in the ‘Three Weeks Deal’ that I had received in both written and voice messages, in Arabic and English,” Gershon Baskin wrote in The Times of Israel.
“But at that point, the Israeli negotiators responded that ‘the Prime Minister did not agree to end the war.’ Even though the ‘Three Week Deal’ proposal landed on the desk of President Biden, his person in charge, Bret McGurk, refused to stray from the bad deal that he was negotiating,” he added.
Baskin said that in October 2024, he met with members of the US negotiating team who told him they were “as frustrated as I was with their inability to convince Biden and Biden’s people to look seriously at the deal on the table.”
Earlier this year, Michael Herzog, who served as the Israeli ambassador to the US during the Biden administration, said that Biden never put pressure on Israel to reach a ceasefire in Gaza. “God did the State of Israel a favor that Biden was the president during this period, because it could have been much worse,” Herzog said. “We fought for over a year, and the administration never came to us and said, ‘ceasefire now.’ It never did. And that’s not to be taken for granted.”
The Biden administration also pushed the narrative that Hamas was the only impediment to a ceasefire deal when it was clear that Israel was blocking it. Baskin said that the Arab mediating countries, Qatar and Egypt, both conveyed to him that Israel was blocking an agreement.
“That is the same message I received from the Egyptian intelligence – Hamas was ready for a deal to release all of the hostages, not to govern Gaza any longer, and to end the war. But Israel was not prepared to go ahead,” he said.
Baskin said that after conversations with Israeli officials in December 2024, it was clear to him that “the only way the war would come to an end would be when President Trump decides it has to end.”
