As of October 2025, the guns have fallen silent, at least for now. Twenty Israeli hostages seized in Hamas’s October 7, 2023 assault have been released, and Israel has freed nearly two thousand Palestinian detainees. Trump, ever the showman, has declared victory, claiming to have “ended the Gaza war.” Netanyahu’s right-wing coalition, beleaguered by isolation, has largely allowed him to bask in the glow.
But the deal Trump has been celebrating in Sharm el-Sheikh is less the product of sudden inspiration than the culmination of a long, bruising process that began two years earlier, one shaped above all by Joe Biden’s military backing, diplomatic persistence, and political restraint.
As Biden himself would caution from hard experience, the appearance of closure should be treated skeptically. Hamas remains armed and Gaza’s governance unresolved. Much heavy lifting is required before peace can become more than a ceremonial ceasefire.
Can Trump summon the patience and skill to make it last? For inspiration, he might look to the man whose policies laid the groundwork. And Israelis, too, may count themselves fortunate that Biden helped steer their country through its gravest crisis since the Yom Kippur War.
Biden’s Arsenal and Restraint
From the morning after October 7, Biden moved swiftly to shore up Israel’s morale and capabilities. His was no perfunctory gesture but a full-throttle commitment. Within days, U.S. transports were delivering precision munitions, artillery shells, and Iron Dome interceptors under emergency drawdown authority. By November, Congress had approved a $14.3 billion supplemental package atop the $3.8 billion in annual military assistance already guaranteed under the Obama-era memorandum of understanding. Biden accelerated deliveries, replenished missile stockpiles, and authorized direct intelligence coordination that gave Israel’s military a decisive edge.
In April 2024, he literally saved Israel from catastrophe. When Iran launched more than two hundred ballistic missiles and drones in retaliation for an Israeli strike on Damascus, Biden ordered U.S. destroyers in the Red Sea and Eastern Mediterranean to join Israel’s defense. American interceptors knocked down scores of incoming warheads. The message to Tehran was loud and clear: Israel would not stand alone.
Less than a year later, when Israel struck Iranian nuclear facilities, a campaign greenlit under Trump’s early tenure but executed by an Israeli military armed and nurtured under Biden, the United States again stepped in to blunt Iran’s retaliation. U.S. Patriot and Aegis systems, already integrated through Biden-era coordination, intercepted a second wave of missiles.
That success was not just Trump’s doing but the dividend of the security infrastructure Biden had spent two years reinforcing. Israel’s arsenal, intelligence integration, and operational confidence were the fruits of Biden’s policy, not Trump’s improvisation.
Biden’s backing had enabled Israel to strike well beyond Gaza during the first two years of the crisis. With U.S. logistical and intelligence support, Israeli jets hit Hamas-linked depots in Lebanon, arms corridors in Syria, and Revolutionary Guard targets in Iran. These strikes crippled Hamas’s regional support network and underscored that Israel’s reach, and resilience, were, in practice, joint U.S.–Israeli achievements.
Balancing Support and Moral Constraint
Yet Biden was never just a cheerleader. Throughout 2024, he sought to balance solidarity with restraint. He pressed Netanyahu to open Gaza’s access routes for humanitarian aid, to temper operations in Rafah, and to spare population centers that had become emblems of Palestinian suffering. When persuasion failed, he used leverage, delaying shipments of 2,000-pound bombs until Israel agreed to adjust targeting protocols.
This uneasy dance, arming Israel while pleading for restraint, was what kept the war within limits that could lead, eventually, to negotiation.
Diplomacy in Phases
Biden’s diplomacy ran on twin tracks: battlefield management and incremental peacemaking. In November 2023, his administration brokered the first truce of the war, four days of relative calm that produced the first large-scale exchange of captives: roughly fifty Israeli hostages for 150 Palestinian prisoners. That success set the pattern for what followed.
In May 2024, Biden unveiled a three-phase Gaza roadmap: an initial ceasefire tied to hostage-prisoner exchanges, a reconstruction interval, and eventually a regional compact backed by Arab states. The plan produced another, more ambitious deal in January 2025, still on Biden’s watch. Over eight successive rounds of swaps, Hamas released hostages, some alive, some dead, in exchange for hundreds of Palestinian prisoners.
The first round, on January 19–20, freed three Israeli women in return for ninety detainees. By the time Biden left office that month, the machinery of exchange was institutionalized. He had gotten all sides, as one aide put it, “a little pregnant,” committed just enough to negotiation that none could fully walk away.
Biden had also pressed for a regional payoff. His envoys spent months courting Saudi Arabia, seeking a security arrangement that would normalize relations with Israel in exchange for U.S. guarantees to Riyadh and a modest Israeli nod toward Palestinian statehood. Mohammed bin Salman repeatedly neared the threshold of agreement, only to be deterred by Netanyahu’s refusal to recognize any two-state pathway. By mid-2024, Israeli generals were telling their American counterparts that Hamas’s military capacity had been “severely degraded” and posed no existential threat. But Netanyahu’s political calculus demanded maximalism, total victory or nothing, and his far-right partners ensured that Biden’s diplomacy stalled.
Trump Steps In
That is the context Trump walked into. When he re-entered the scene in 2025, his approach was characteristically erratic. At first, he mused about turning Gaza into a “tourist mecca,” then suggested relocating Gazans to Egypt. Only as his team began reviewing draft proposals left over from the previous administration did Trump’s negotiators start inserting themselves into the talks, nudging Netanyahu toward arrangements already shaped by Biden’s mediators.
Trump’s eventual “20-point Gaza plan,” the blueprint for the current ceasefire, bore an unmistakable resemblance to Biden’s 2024 roadmap: phased exchanges, demilitarization guarantees, reconstruction funds, and monitored border regimes. The distinction was mainly one of branding: Trump’s signature atop Biden’s architecture.
Still, Trump was eager to dramatize his control of events and to reassert Washington’s hard edge. Within weeks of taking office, he lifted Biden’s suspension on 2,000-pound bomb shipments, a gesture meant to signal that Israel’s leash had been loosened. When Netanyahu requested U.S. refueling and reconnaissance assistance for air operations against Iranian nuclear reactors that summer, Trump readily agreed. And as Hamas hesitated over the terms of prisoner release, Trump publicly threatened to “unleash Bibi” if they balked—a crude but unmistakable signal that he was prepared to let Israel strike harder than Biden ever had.
These moves intimidated Hamas back to the table. They also deepened the region’s exhaustion and sense of peril. The optics, however, suited Trump perfectly. He read the fatigue — Israeli, Palestinian, and American — and seized the stage at the moment of exhaustion. The few remaining live hostages came home; the shooting paused; the cameras rolled.
But the structure beneath the celebration remains fragile. Gaza’s governance is undefined, Hamas still controls much of its underground network, and Israel’s cabinet has approved only the framework of the deal, leaving key provisions to be ratified. Netanyahu boycotted the Cairo summit convened to formalize it, keeping his coalition options open. His ministers have already threatened to resume the war if Hamas does not capitulate entirely.
The Legacy Beneath the Optics
So here we are: a moment of quiet built on Biden’s foundations but commanded by Trump’s theatrics. Without Biden’s emergency appropriations, missile-defense interventions, quiet intelligence sharing, and painstaking shuttle diplomacy, Israel would not have had the strength, incentive or political leverage to reach this point. Without Biden’s early truce and exchange initiatives, there would have been no diplomatic template for Trump to repackage.
The deterrence, the trust, even the language of negotiation that now exist are Biden’s legacy. Whether Trump can turn that inheritance into something lasting remains to be seen.
We can rejoice at the release of surviving hostages and the prospect, however fragile, of Gaza’s respite. But Netanyahu’s domestic imperatives have not changed, Hamas’s grievances remain raw, and Gaza’s devastation will haunt the region for a generation.
Biden built a bridge (part military shield, part moral nudge) between vengeance and diplomacy. What Trump is parading now is a photo op on that bridge. Unless he extends it toward a real settlement, one that offers both sides a future, this so-called ceasefire will dissolve into the same endless cycle of war and ruin.