President-elect Trump and President Biden’s teams worked “hand in hand” for a hostage and ceasefire in Gaza deal, according to U.S. Ambassador to Israel Jack Lew.
In the wake of last year’s election, the Trump and Biden teams began working together, Lew told Reuters in a Thursday report from the outlet.
“I think a lot of progress has been made. The fact that you have an outgoing and an incoming administration that have worked hand in hand to make the case for urgency, I think, has been noticed by all parties,” the ambassador said, according to Reuters.
A new ceasefire agreement between Israel and Palestinian militant group Hamas was unveiled Wednesday. It is expected to begin Sunday, with its first phase including a six-week ceasefire, as well as Hamas releasing 33 hostages out of an estimated 94 people both alive and dead, that it has held for over a year.
Biden hailed the agreement on Wednesday, saying getting “to this deal has not been easy.”
“I’ve worked on foreign policy for decades. This was one of the toughest negotiations I’ve ever experienced,” he said, adding they reached the deal because of “We reached this point because to “the pressure Israel built on Hamas, backed by the United States.”
However, on Thursday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu alleged that Hamas had reneged on parts of the ceasefire and hostage agreement. He said in a statement that his Cabinet isn’t going to sign off on the deal until the Palestinian militant group agrees to every part of the arrangement.
“The fact that [Biden] and the president-elect use different language in this case may create constructive tension because they have the same goal, and [Trump] has used language that makes people say, ‘What’s going to happen next?’ If we were working at cross-purposes, it would be perhaps a different situation. But we’re not. There’s no daylight between what we’re trying to accomplish,” Lew said of a Gaza deal in the Reuters report.
