Biden’s hopes for Gaza cease-fire diminish despite pressure campaign

President Biden’s hopes for brokering a cease-fire before leaving office are looking increasingly distant, even as the White House ramps up pressure on Israel and Hamas to reach an agreement in cease-fire talks set to resume Thursday. 

“It’s getting harder,” Biden said Wednesday when asked if a cease-fire deal was becoming a more distant possibility, while traveling in New Orleans. 

“I’m not giving up.”

But military action is outpacing and undermining intensive efforts at diplomacy. Iran is expected this week to launch a retaliatory attack against Israel for the alleged assassination of a top Hamas political official in Tehran on July 31, and Israel drew global condemnation with a strike Saturday on a school compound where Palestinians were sheltering, killing dozens. Israel said it was targeting Hamas militants.

While Biden is deploying intensive diplomatic efforts to calm tensions in the region, momentum in Gaza seems to be moving in the wrong direction with about five months left in his presidency, with both Israel and Hamas reportedly making new demands in recent weeks. 

Hamas has so far rejected participating in the Thursday talks, accusing Netanyahu of changing the goalposts of the cease-fire terms, and furious over the Israeli military operation over the weekend.

State Department press secretary Vedant Patel said Tuesday that Qatar had assured the U.S. that “they will work to have Hamas represented.”  

Netanyahu, who has confirmed a delegation to the talks, has rejected Hamas’s characterizations that it had introduced new terms, though The New York Times reviewed documents that seem to support those claims. 

Also hanging over the talks is Iran’s threat to launch a retaliatory strike against Israel, with analysts predicting Iran and its proxies — particularly Hezbollah in Lebanon — will coordinate a large-scale, multifront attack consisting of drones and missiles. 

But Iran is also sending signals that it could hold back its retaliation in favor of the cease-fire talks, with three, unnamed Iranian sources telling Reuters that only a cease-fire can stop a military attack on Israel. 

Biden, speaking to reporters Tuesday, said it’s his expectation for Iran to hold off its retaliatory strike in favor of the cease-fire talks. 

“We’ll see what Iran does. We’ll see what happens.”

Brian Carter, Middle East portfolio manager at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), said any Iranian support for a cease-fire is likely meant to drive a wedge in Israeli society while Netanyahu is viewed as torpedoing the talks, positioning itself as a responsible actor trying to avoid actions that would disrupt the talks or escalate into a larger war. 

But an Iranian attack against Israel is also viewed as a necessary requirement to reestablish deterrence in the region. Iran launched hundreds of missiles and drones against Israel in April in retaliation for Israel’s alleged killing of a top Iranian commander in Syria. 

“The open question there is whether Iran prioritizes their reachieving deterrence, or whether they prioritize being able to claim victory in Gaza, if Hamas was able to get Israel to accept a cease-fire,” Carter said. 

Biden has made achieving a cease-fire between Israel and Hamas a priority focus of his final months in office, after achieving a major success in bringing home three Americans and a green card holder unjustly held in Russian prisons in a historic prisoner exchange earlier this month. 

Vice President Harris would surely provide more continuity than former President Trump when it comes to Biden’s Middle East policy, but there may be some changes even if Democrats maintain the White House. 

Harris has signaled a willingness to take a stronger stance in calling out Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s responsibility for the widespread suffering of Palestinians, though her office says she is opposed to an arms embargo to rein in Israel. 

Trump has advocated for helping Israel finish the war as quickly as possible, though it’s unclear how he would hope to achieve that. Netanyahu is seen as preferring the Republican presidential nominee over Harris. 

Even as Biden puts all his diplomatic might into bringing Israel and Hamas to the table, both Netanyahu and Yahya Sinwar, Hamas’s chief decisionmaker hiding in tunnels in the Gaza Strip, appear to have more incentive to continue the war than agree to a cease-fire. 

Netanyahu is under intense pressure to secure the release of the remaining hostages held by Hamas since its Oct. 7 terrorist attack, but he has resolved to wipe out Hamas and maintain Israeli security control in Gaza — terms that appease his far-right coalition partners who hold the power to bring down his government.

And Sinwar, the architect of the Oct. 7 attack who a top U.S. official called a “psychopath” and “messianic,” likely views continuing the war as a way to further his goals of weakening Israel. 

“Sinwar doesn’t feel necessarily pressured by Israeli action to commit to a cease-fire right now,” said Carter of AEI.

“I think that he expects that his organization, if not necessarily him, will survive this war intact to some degree. The Israelis have beat them up pretty badly, but I think, as a political entity, and to some degree as a military entity, he believes he will win, and he’s willing to wait it out.”

Biden, backed by Egypt and Qatar, has proposed providing Israel and Hamas “a final bridging proposal” to resolve remaining gaps between the two parties over a framework laid out by Biden at the end of May and endorsed by the United Nations Security Council. 

“We have called on both sides to resume urgent discussion on Thursday, August 15 in Doha or Cairo to close all remaining gaps and commence implementation of the deal without further delay,” read a joint statement by Biden and the leaders of Egypt and Qatar released last week. 

The cease-fire deal, in the most immediate terms, seeks to save the lives of dozens of hostages held by Hamas since they were kidnapped from southern Israel on Oct. 7 — including Americans — and bring desperately needed relief to Palestinians in Gaza suffering a devastating humanitarian crisis after more than 10 months of war. 

But the president also views the deal as the key to unlocking broader peace in the Middle East, with the potential to lower the temperature region-wide, deter Iran and its proxies from launching potentially escalatory attacks, pave the way for civilian Palestinian self-rule and broker ties between Israel and Saudi Arabia. 

“Whether the Biden administration will see successful outcomes in this delicate balancing act — using diplomacy to reach a cease-fire while also sending messages through word and deed aimed at preventing a wider regional war and helping Israel defend itself — depends largely upon the decisions and actions of key actors in the region, namely Israel, Iran, Hamas, and Hezbollah,” Brian Katulis, senior fellow for U.S. foreign policy with the Middle East Institute, wrote in a brief Monday. 

“The coming days will likely be pivotal and may determine if the clashes of the previous weeks erupt into a bigger conflict or give way to a diplomatic settlement. Either way, two chronic conditions that have plagued the wider region — the negative role Iran and its regional partners play and the lack of a just settlement to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict — will likely persist for some time to come.”