How historic ceasefire deal was sealed with 10 minutes to spare

Israeli and Hamas negotiators never met face-to-face, but ultimately, they were just a floor apart. The ceasefire talks, mediated by Qatar, Egypt, and the United States, had been ongoing for months, often teetering on the brink of despair. Now, key figures were gathered in a building in Doha, and the pace of negotiations became exceptionally intense.

A deal was close, but there had been setbacks before. One source described last-minute efforts to prevent the deal from collapsing, with the Qatari prime minister's podium already set up for him to announce the agreement. "The negotiations were literally going on until 10 minutes before the press conference. That’s how last minute this deal was," said a source familiar with the talks.

The BBC interviewed several officials from all sides to understand how the final days of this secretive process unfolded. The agreement did not materialize out of thin air. The overall framework of the deal reached on January 15 was largely the same as the one proposed by President Joe Biden in a White House speech last May. It adopted the same three-phase approach, which would achieve a ceasefire, the release of Israeli hostages in exchange for Palestinian prisoners, and a gradual withdrawal of Israeli forces from Gaza.

But sources familiar with the discussions agree that the dynamics of the negotiations shifted decisively in mid-December, and the pace changed accordingly. Hamas, reeling from the killing of its leader Yahya Sinwar by Israel in Gaza two months earlier, was becoming increasingly isolated. Its ally Hezbollah in Lebanon was badly hit and had agreed to a truce with Israel. The Syrian government under Bashar al-Assad, backed by Iran, was also being pushed back.

The view in Washington was that Hamas was forced to abandon the idea that "the cavalry was going to come to save it," as one US official put it. "The shift fundamentally changed the situation, and what that meant for Hamas’s calculus cannot be overstated," said a senior Biden administration official familiar with the talks. An unnamed Israeli official said that Hamas had been "not in a hurry" to reach an agreement, and had been "dictating" rather than negotiating. He said that changed after Sinwar’s death and after Israel’s actions against Hamas's allies in the region.

Moreover, the official said, "momentum was created by two administrations" – the Biden White House and the incoming Trump team. "We couldn’t have gotten to this deal until the conditions changed," the official added. On December 12, Biden’s negotiating team visited Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. White House National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, Middle East envoy Brett McGurk, and CIA director Bill Burns were all present. An unnamed US official said the meeting lasted "hours," focusing on the "new regional situation" and "how to transition from the truce in Lebanon to the next round of intensive discussions about Gaza."

At this point, another piece was on the chessboard: Donald Trump. On December 16, a few weeks after Trump’s victory, the BBC interviewed a Hamas official who was unusually optimistic about the ceasefire efforts, suggesting they seemed more serious. The official, who had been involved in every round of talks since November 2023, seemed reassured by a message that an advisor to the incoming US president had sent to the mediators, indicating that Trump wanted a deal before his inauguration.

Trump had also warned that Hamas would "pay a price" if it did not agree to release the hostages, but the Palestinian official was optimistic. "This time, the pressure will not be only on Hamas, as it was under the Biden administration," the official said. "Netanyahu will also be under pressure. He is the one who is obstructing the deal, and Trump seems to be aware of this." However, the official's prediction of a possible deal before Christmas proved overly optimistic.

In December, the process remained fraught with problems. Israel publicly ruled out releasing certain high-profile prisoners, while the White House accused Hamas of creating obstacles over the release of hostages. "Hamas refused to agree - that was the breaking point at the time - to the list of hostages that would be released in the first phase of the deal," said a Biden administration official. "That was so fundamental. This was a hostage release deal. Unless you agree on the list of hostages that are going to be released, there is no deal."

The same official said that Hamas made "completely disingenuous" claims about not knowing the whereabouts of the hostages, adding: "We held the line, basically walked away from the table until Hamas agreed on the list of hostages." An anonymous Israeli official said that Hamas was trying to conceal the number of hostages who were alive and was "trying to direct us to only send us bodies." For its part, Hamas claimed that Israel had unexpectedly added 11 names to the list of hostages they wanted released in the first phase. Hamas argued that they were reserve soldiers and therefore did not qualify to be released alongside the women, injured, and elderly hostages in the first phase.

The door for continued efforts by Qatari and Egyptian mediators remained open, and on January 3, Hamas proposed the release of 110 Palestinian prisoners serving life sentences, which seemed to be a breakthrough. There were now established terms of reference for such deals. For every hostage Hamas was to release, Israel had to provide what was termed in the draft agreement as "keys" – meaning an agreed number of Palestinian prisoners, even specific identities.

"There is an equation for how many Palestinian prisoners get released. For female soldiers, for example, there is a key. For elderly men, there is a key. For female civilians, there is a key. All of this has been worked out, and prisoners have been named, there are hundreds of prisoners on the list," said a US official. The documents exchanged in the negotiations – Palestinian prisoners for Hamas-held hostages – were known as "keys."

At this stage of the negotiations, Hamas also made concessions on two long-standing demands: a full withdrawal of Israeli forces from Gaza in the first phase, and a formal Israeli commitment to a full ceasefire. Sensing a breakthrough, Egyptian mediators urgently dispatched Major General Ahmed Abdel Khaliq, who is in charge of Palestinian affairs at Egyptian intelligence, to Doha. After meeting with Hamas representatives, he received confirmation that the group would make what a senior Hamas official described as "painful concessions."

But on January 6, according to a Palestinian official, Israel rejected Hamas's proposal regarding 11 hostages. Hamas responded by sending a list of 34 Israeli hostages with their names and ages to the BBC and other media outlets. Two days later, the body of one of those on the list – Yosef Al-Zayadna – was found in Gaza. The list included reserve soldiers, which indicated that Hamas was willing to release them in the first phase. This appeared to be an attempt to embarrass Netanyahu and to mobilize the families of the hostages in Israel and around the world to pressure him to accept the deal.

It also showed that Hamas had not given up. In the final stages of the negotiations, in the hot Doha nights, meetings continued into the early hours. Over the past month, they had developed into what has been described by multiple officials familiar with the details as "proximity talks," with both sides in the same two-story building. A senior US official said that the Hamas delegation was on the ground floor, and the Israeli delegation was upstairs. The mediators passed notes between them. Maps of Israeli troop withdrawal plans and details about which hostages or prisoners would be released were passed back and forth.

"It took a lot of work, and I have to say, all of this really was not fully buttoned up until the [final] hours," the official said. Inside the building, the delegations met separately with senior figures from Qatar and Egypt. The Qatari Prime Minister, Mohammed bin Abdulrahman al-Thani, was also closely involved in the details. In the final phase of the negotiations, two key areas were resolved: the lists of hostages held by Hamas and Palestinian prisoners held by Israel to be released, and the locations for the first phase of the withdrawal of Israeli troops from populated areas of Gaza.

By January 9, the pressure was escalating. Trump's envoy, Biden's envoy, and the head of Egyptian intelligence held a serious eight-hour meeting in Doha. A senior Egyptian official told the BBC: "We are at the closest point to reaching an agreement." About 90% of the outstanding issues had been agreed, but further negotiations were needed. Steve Witkoff, Trump's newly appointed Middle East envoy, was dispatched to Tel Aviv to meet Netanyahu. Although not yet officially in office, the New York real estate mogul was becoming increasingly involved in the negotiations, with Trump showing a keen interest.

He was about to be sent on a mission that would prove to be crucial. When Trump's Middle East envoy arrived in Israel on January 11, it was the Sabbath. Witkoff was asked to wait until the end of the Sabbath to meet Netanyahu, but the envoy broke with protocol, refused, and demanded an immediate meeting with the Prime Minister. Netanyahu appears to have been subjected to some serious hardball during the meeting, and the intervention of the Trump camp to get the Israeli government to drop its final reservations seems to have been crucial.

The atmosphere at the meeting was reportedly tense, and the message from the incoming president to Netanyahu was clear: Trump wanted a deal – and he wanted it done now. An unnamed Israeli official, commenting on the talks, said it was a "very significant meeting." When Witkoff returned to Doha, he remained in the negotiating room, spending time with Biden's envoy, Mr. McGurk, in what two US officials described as a "nearly unprecedented" transition effort in US diplomacy.

This week, Hamas official Basem Naim told Al-Araby TV that he "could not imagine that [this deal] could have been achieved without the pressure of the incoming administration led by President Trump" – and specifically mentioned Witkoff's presence in the negotiations. By now, word that a deal might be imminent was out, and public expectations were building – especially among the families of those being held hostage and the displaced Palestinians inside Gaza. The final 72 hours of negotiations, according to one source, involved a constant back and forth over the details of how the agreement would be implemented.

A source close to the negotiations described the "arrangements and logistics" being worked out for the release of hostages in Gaza and the withdrawal of Israeli forces. On January 12, a senior Palestinian official familiar with the talks said, "All officials are in the same building," adding: "Tonight is decisive. We are a few steps away from a deal." That meeting lasted six hours, but like many times before, it reached an impasse.

The disagreement this time was over the mechanism for the return of displaced people from southern Gaza to the north. Israel wanted to search the returnees and their vehicles to ensure no militants or military equipment was being transported, which Hamas refused to accept. The mediators proposed that the searches be conducted by Qatari and Egyptian technical teams. Both sides agreed, and one of the last remaining sticking points was resolved. Just after 6 pm on January 15, a Hamas negotiator wrote in a message to the BBC: "It's all over."

The podium was being prepared. A deal that once seemed impossible had been hammered out. _Additional reporting by Sean Seddon_