For more on all of this, we turn now to two NewsHour regulars, David Mokoski of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and Hussein Ivesh with the Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington.

Thank you both for being here. Hussein, we'll start with you. President Biden today made clear that he laid out the precise contours of this agreement back in May.

It was of course almost agreed to in July.

Why now?

Well, and even it had antecedents going back to January and even November of 2023.

So these ideas have been around for a long time.

But I think the two inflection points are the election of Donald Trump and the pressure

he put on Prime Minister

Netanyahu, which builds on pressure from the Israeli public and the Israeli military to make

such a deal.

I think Trump was very clear that he did not want this war to go on during his inauguration.

And on the other hand, major change of power within Hamas,

inflected mainly by the fall of the Assad regime,

which signals the rise of Turkey and Qatar in the region

at the expense of Iran and Hezbollah

and shifts power within Hamas away from the gunmen on the ground

in Gaza who did the October 7 attack back to the politicians, the Politburo that have left

Qatar but are now gathered in Turkey.

And the main regional card that Hamas can play now is not the military links they have with Iran, but the

political and diplomatic links they have with Turkey and Qatar. And Turkey and Qatar don't want this

war to go on. So between pressure on those two sides, you got a deal.

David Makovsky, there was a temporary ceasefire that was in place in November of 2023 that

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