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Steve Witkoff, US president-elect Donald Trump's Middle East envoy, has been credited with helping to deliver the Gaza ceasefire and hostage-release agreement announced on Wednesday.
The New York-born billionaire, 67, injected energy and a stern business approach into the home stretch of negotiations, sources told The National on Thursday. Mr Witkoff's approach in the Qatari capital Doha helped break a year-long deadlock in an on-and-off process that had frustrated mediators from the US, Egypt and Qatar, the sources added.
The agreement announced on Wednesday provides for a 42-day truce, the initial release of 33 hostages held by Hamas, a partial Israeli troop withdrawal and the return home of displaced Palestinians. It also calls for a surge in the delivery of humanitarian aid into the devastated territory. Also envisioned are further talks during the initial truce, about a full Israeli withdrawal and a permanent ceasefire.
Mr Trump praised Mr Witkoff in a post on Truth Social platform on Wednesday.
"With this deal in place, my national security team, through the efforts of Special Envoy to the Middle East, Steve Witkoff, will continue to work closely with Israel and our allies to make sure Gaza NEVER again becomes a safe haven for terrorists," he said.
The sources said the negotiations in Doha reached an unprecedented level of intensity in the 72 hours before the announcement of the deal by Qatar's chief negotiator, Prime Minister Mohammed bin Jassim Al Thani, at a news conference attended by Mr Witkoff.
In the lead up to the final three-day push in Doha, Mr Witkoff, the sources and Israeli media reports said, held tense talks with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in which the American envoy left the Israeli leader no choice but to quickly strike a deal.
"It was by far the toughest week of the negotiations and that was the case because of Mr Trump's envoy, whose aggressive approach and near obsession with reaching a deal electrified meeting rooms in Doha," said one of the sources.
Mr Netanyahu and his right-wing government partners are widely blamed for the failure of diplomatic efforts in the past year to reach a Gaza ceasefire, with Israeli media reports pointing to the Israeli leader's quest for political survival and determination to annihilate Hamas before ending the war as his main motivations.
It was in Doha this week that Mr Witkoff had to dig deep to produce an agreement to end a war that broke out 15 months ago, which has killed more than 46,700 Palestinians and threatened to plunge the entire Middle East into a wider conflict with archenemies Iran and Israel at its epicentre. The Gaza war was sparked by an attack on southern Israel by Hamas-led fighters, who killed about 1,200 people and took about 240 hostages.
Mr Witkoff, said the source, arrived in Doha with a large file containing a wealth of details of past rounds of negotiations and why so many attempts to end the war collapsed at the last minute.
"He addressed everyone by first name and diligently scribbled notes as he discussed the details of a possible deal with everyone. He paid attention, for example, to the problematic case of some Palestinian prisoners Hamas wanted to see free but Israel was reluctant to release," said the source.
"His eye for details, resolve and energy prompted the Hamas negotiators to adopt a more transparent approach in the indirect negotiations with him. In many ways, he was like a seasoned merchant; he gets good buys and knows how to sell."
The sources said the envoy's skills and patience were fully tested during the final hours of the negotiations when he and other mediators had to quickly overcome last-minute hurdles such as Hamas's demands for maps showing the positions of Israeli forces after they redeploy outside Gaza's urban centres as provided in the deal.
Hamas had also objected in the 11th hour to Israel's insistence that it will gradually, rather than partially, withdraw from Salah Al Din corridor, or the Philadelphi corridor, which runs the entire length of the Egypt-Gaza border on the Palestinian side.
The negotiations, according to the sources, took place in a luxury suburban Doha hotel in which the Qatari authorities booked and secured four stories while they allowed the rest of the hotel to operate normally.
Security operatives from Qatar and Egypt acted as round-the-clock messengers in some cases to circumvent the terrorist designation given to Hamas by the US and Israeli governments which prohibits direct dealings with the group's members, they said.
The security of the Hamas negotiators posed an additional problem to the process following a string of assassinations blamed on Israel, including the killing of political leader and chief negotiator Ismail Haniyeh in July in Tehran. Compounding that concern was the attacks in September on Hezbollah members in Lebanon through explosives planted in their pagers and walkie-talkies.
"The Egyptians and Qataris went to the Americans and told them they must ensure that Israel does not target Hamas's negotiators," said one source.
Gaza enjoyed a single respite from the war when a week-long truce went into force in November 2023. The US, Egyptian and Qatari mediators had since come close on several occasions to clinching a deal only for their efforts to falter over the intransigence of Hamas and Israel.
But the process was significantly re-energised when Mr Trump won the US presidential election in November and later threatened that there will be "hell to pay" if the hostages were not released before his January 20 inauguration.
The Gaza war also reduced to rubble much of the heavily built up Gaza and displaced the majority of its 2.3 million residents.
