World leaders, diplomatic insiders, and much of the media are celebrating a ceasefire in Gaza calling it a “peace deal” and endorsing President Donald Trump’s now unsuccessful campaign for a Nobel Peace Prize.
US secretary of state Marc Rubio lavished praise on his boss, saying the turning point came when Trump convened meetings with Arab and Muslim leaders on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly.
“The president had some extraordinary phone calls and meetings that required a high degree of intensity and commitment and made this happen,” Rubio said.
As the deal emerged, Trump let it be known that it was his conversations with Netanyahu when he told him, “you can’t fight the world, Bibi”, that also played a part.
Yet Trump himself seemed to acknowledge that it wasn’t all just down to the art of the deal when he said: “So many different things happened that were so amazing. It’s a lot of talent involved, I’ll tell you. But there was a certain degree of luck, too. You know, you need luck also. There is such a thing as luck.”
The latest, most detailed argument for The Donald to get the Norwegian gong, came from an Israeli hostage negotiator who said it was only the current US president who could have delivered on a deal that was on the desk of his predecessor a year ago.
On the face of it, Gershon Baskin’s revelations, which he published on social media, show that Trump succeeded where Joe Biden failed.
“This deal could have been done a long time ago,” he wrote. “Hamas agreed to all of the same terms in September 2024. But at that point the response of the Israeli negotiators was that ‘the prime minister did not agree to end the war’.”
That Netanyahu refused the deal a year ago and that Biden failed to make him take it is not new. But it does reinforce the idea that Biden was weak – and that only Trump could have held “Bibi’s” feet to the fire to get him to agree to end the slaughter in Gaza, and to get the remaining hostages, dead and alive, back home.
“I met with members of the American negotiating team in October 2024, and they were as frustrated as I was in their inability to convince Biden and Biden’s people to look seriously at the deal on the table,” said Baskin, who was running back-channel negotiations for the release of hostages with Hamas at the time.
The Independent’s sources have confirmed that Biden’s own staff were deeply frustrated at his refusal to put pressure on Netanyahu to limit his military campaign in Gaza to a few weeks after the October 7 atrocities.
Biden, they said, would not take their advice and sided with Netanyahu.
A year later, with much (but not all) of Gaza in ruins, Baskin’s proposals, thrashed out with the help of Qatar, were getting nowhere in the White House.
“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 ready,” says Baskin.
