Palestinians receive food parcels after aid trucks entered from the Karem Abu Salem crossing, in Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip yesterday. Photo / Saher Alghorra, The New York Times
Why now? Why did it take 736 days?
That was the question coursing through the celebrations on the streets of Tel Aviv and Jerusalem at the weekend as hundreds of thousands of people poured into Israel’s Hostage Square.
They were anticipating the release (last night NZT) of the 20 hostages believed still alive and the possible end of a brutal war that left the Gaza Strip destroyed, and Israel at once stronger and more diplomatically isolated than ever.
Holding up photos of the remaining hostages, the crowds cheered at the mention of United States President Donald Trump, who many Israelis believe forced Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to seize this moment.
They listened intently to Steve Witkoff, the President’s special envoy, and Jared Kushner, his son-in-law, address the cheering throngs.
Overarching the moment was the question of whether this deal could have been done far sooner, when more hostages may have been alive, and before tens of thousands of Palestinians were killed.
That argument lay behind the boos that ran through the crowd when Witkoff mentioned Netanyahu. Hearing the reaction, Witkoff tried to defend Netanyahu, insisting that “I was in the trenches with the Prime Minister” and saw how he was seeking “a safer, stronger future for the Jewish people”. That was met with more booing.
Historians may argue for years whether the Israel-Hamas war could have ended a year ago this week, when Israeli forces tripped upon and killed Yahya Sinwar, the Hamas chief and architect of the October 7, 2023, massacre.
Or, alternatively, whether Israel and Hamas missed a chance to build on the ceasefire that President Joe Biden and his aides left in place before Trump took over.
Despite the fact that Witkoff was involved in the January deal, it did not stick, and early in Trump’s term the war resumed, bringing with it more death and suffering.
Debates over how wars could have ended sooner, and saved thousands or millions of lives, are hardly new.
Historians are still arguing over whether Japan would have surrendered anyway if US President Harry Truman had decided against dropping two atomic weapons and whether US President Richard Nixon waited years too long to get out of Vietnam.
Biden and Trump argued for an earlier exit from Afghanistan.
“This is a different moment — we didn’t have then what President Trump has now,” Antony Blinken, Biden’s secretary of state, said in an interview over the weekend.
“Hamas is defeated as a military organisation, isolated diplomatically, it’s lost its patrons — Iran, Hezbollah and the Houthis — and it has alienated the people of Gaza.”
He added: “Israel long ago achieved its war aims of destroying Hamas’ capacity to repeat October 7 and killing the leaders responsible — at great cost to Palestinian civilians caught in the crossfire. The Israeli people want the remaining hostages home and the war to end.”
Here is a look at some of the explanations for why the hostage release — and perhaps a new start for Gaza — is happening now.
Feints, bluffs and an election
Two years ago this week, after the October 7 attack, Biden travelled to Israel to show his solidarity. He also issued a warning — strongly in private, his aides reported later, and more gently in public — that there was a risk to overreaction.
“Justice must be done,” Biden said on his one-day visit on October 18, 2023.
“But I caution that, while you feel that rage, don’t be consumed by it. After 9/11, we were enraged in the US. While we sought justice and got justice, we also made mistakes.”
Biden was reacting to the fact that Israel had cut off virtually all food and fuel to Gaza.
For a while, the US kept the pressure off the Israelis, even vetoing a United Nations Security Council resolution to keep humanitarian corridors open to allow the flow of food and civilians. Biden would need time, US officials maintained, to quietly negotiate a deal.
Neither side was ready.
Hamas spent the summer of 2024 arguing over how far Israeli forces would have to pull back along the Philadelphi corridor, a narrow strip along the border between Gaza and Egypt.
“The blame is on Hamas, because it could have been done all these steps earlier, but they refused to discuss disarmament or relinquishing control,” said Amos Yadlin, a former head of military intelligence for Israel who runs Mind Israel, a strategic consulting company.
“But it is also on Netanyahu, because it wasn’t until last summer that he was even willing to lay out demands for ending the war.”
Then Trump won the presidency back, and the Biden Administration was determined to get a ceasefire in place by January, before it left office. It drafted a peace plan, much of which was quite similar to the “20 point plan” Trump recently issued.
There was slow progress: More than 130 hostages had been released by the time the January ceasefire took place.
“We handed over a ceasefire that silenced the guns, had hostages coming out and aid going in, along with a day-after plan to make it permanent,” Blinken said.
When the new administration took over, “the moment was squandered. Israel and Hamas went back to war for eight months.”
Israeli officials tell a different story. Biden was a lame duck, they noted, and disengaged.
Trump was a known entity, less likely to lecture Netanyahu in private or public. They put their money on a new president, and a new negotiating team.
A changed battlefield in 2025
Much changed in Israel’s favour in the new year.
Sinwar’s death sent Hamas into a leadership crisis. Israel’s military pressure grew as Hamas’ supply of ammunition was depleted.
And “the 12-day war with Iran really moved the needle”, said Brett McGurk, who had negotiated in the region since the Bush Administration and was running the talks for Biden.
Suddenly, Hamas realised that the country that had both bankrolled and supplied it could no longer be relied upon.
Multiple factors, Palestinian analysts say, pushed Hamas to begin rethinking the value of continuing to hold the hostages.
“In the beginning, Hamas thought taking the hostages would deter the Israeli Government from waging a big war,” said Mkhaimar Abusada, a Palestinian professor of political science in Egypt, who fled Gaza early in the war.
Now, the logic of holding hostages may have flipped: Rather than protect Gaza from attack, several analysts have noted, their existence was giving Netanyahu an excuse to press ahead.
“If Hamas said no, the war would have gone on — the bloodshed, the destruction and the killing would have gone on and on,” Abusada said.
“So Hamas decided: Let’s just accept this offer and believe the guarantees that the war will not return.”
The Trump factor
Trump famously has little time or patience for traditional diplomacy.
If the State Department’s approach to ceasefires and peace negotiations is to labour over maps and work through diplomatic channels, defining boundaries and anticipating loopholes, Trump negotiates the way he struck real estate deals in New York: in broad concepts, leaving the details to others.
Administration officials say the result suggests that this should be Trump’s model for the future. “He pursued a very non-traditional diplomacy with people who were not 40-year diplomats, but people who brought a fresh perspective to it,” Vice-President JD Vance said on CBS.
“And, of course, the President was criticised for it. The diplomatic team was criticised for it.”
Since Trump took office, Netanyahu largely benefitted from a changed tone. Trump has hosted him at the White House four times, more than any other world leader.
He has called for the cancellation of the Prime Minister’s corruption trial, he has opposed calls for the recognition of a Palestinian state, and he has ordered US forces to bomb Iranian nuclear sites.
On Gaza, the President put few, if any, guardrails on Israel’s offensive, bucking international demands for a ceasefire.
Moreover, to the delight of Israel’s hard-right, the new president wasted weeks consumed with a bizarre plan to annex Gaza, somehow pushing out the Palestinians and building a glistening beach resort, similar to Miami.
Trump once held a similar fantasy about North Korea, and even made North Korea’s leader a short film, with mock-ups of water parks and luxury condos. In the case of Gaza, he circulated an AI-created video of a luxury resort city, with images of him and Netanyahu sipping coffee. The Prime Minister humoured him, praising his vision even while stepping up military pressure.
And Trump signalled the importance of a deal by bringing Kushner back into the swirl of diplomacy, hoping that his business connections with Qatar and other players in the region could be leveraged to good advantage.
It was Kushner who negotiated the Abraham Accords in the first term, in which Arab states recognised Israel — a huge step. Of course, those connections fuel Trump’s critics, who see a blurring of diplomacy and for-profit deals.
The Israeli attempt to kill Hamas negotiators in Qatar, dropping a bomb on their temporary residence, both angered Trump and awakened him.
It gave the US the opportunity to rally Arab states around the 20-point plan, even if they thought many of the details would not work.
And so when Trump called Netanyahu to the White House in September, following the opening of the UN General Assembly, the Prime Minister was in no position to resist him.
He had to call the Prime Minister of Qatar and read an apology to him — while White House photographers recorded the moment. The message was clear: Netanyahu was now in a new world, where he had to heed some American mandates.
Then Trump pressed the Israeli leader to sign on to his 20-point plan, with its ceasefire and the insertion of a “technocratic” temporary government in Gaza backed by an international stability force.
While it fell short of Netanyahu’s maximalist demands, he had to agree to the document. He was both indebted to Trump and aware that provoking his capricious counterpart could lead to negative consequences for himself and for Israel.
He may have also been betting that Hamas would reject the deal, because it required the terrorist group to disarm and leave the territory.
Hamas said “yes, but”, agreeing to the first terms — the hostage release in return for a prisoner swap — but insisting on more negotiations on the critical next steps. Trump ignored the “but”, and simply took the partial yes as full agreement.
“Trump succeeded in convincing Prime Minister Netanyahu to do what perhaps should have been done right after Israel’s victory over Iran — or even earlier, during the second phase of the January 2025 deal,” Yadlin wrote in the Jerusalem Post.
“He grasped what Netanyahu did not: that the war was inflicting immense diplomatic damage and that ‘total victory’ in Gaza was unattainable without killing the hostages, sacrificing soldiers and harming civilians behind whom Hamas hides.
“He understood the Israeli public mood far better than the government — an overwhelming 80% supported bringing the hostages home even at the cost of ending the war.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: David E. Sanger and Adam Rasgon
Photographs by: Saher Alghorra, David Guttenfelder, Amit Elkayam
©2025 THE NEW YORK TIMES