When the peace deal came, it came quickly.

Rumours had been spreading over the course of the day, anticipation grew. A source told me that a deal would be done by Friday, another said perhaps by Thursday evening.

Israel and Hamas agree to peace deal – live updates

They were both wrong. Instead, it came much sooner, announced by Donald Trump on his own social media channel. Without being anywhere near the talks in Egypt, the president was the dominant figure.

Few will argue that he deserves the credit for driving this agreement. We can probably see the origins of all this in Israel’s decision to try to kill the Hamas leadership in Doha.

The attack failed, and the White House was annoyed.

Arab states started to express themselves to Trump more successfully, arguing that it was time for him to rein in Benjamin Netanyahu and bring an end to the war.

They repeated the call at a meeting during the UN General Assembly, which seems to have landed. When the president later met Netanyahu, the 20-point plan was born, which led to this fresh peace agreement.

Does it cover everything? Absolutely not. We don’t know who will run Gaza in the future, for a start, which is a pretty yawning hole when you consider that Gaza’s fresh start is imminent.

We don’t know what will happen to Hamas, or to its weapons, or really how Israel will withdraw from the Strip.

But these talks have always been fuelled by optimism, and by the sense that if you could stop the fighting and get the hostages home, then everything else might just fall into place.

In order to agree to this, Hamas must surely have been given strong assurances that, even at some level, its demands for Palestinian self-determination would bear fruit. Otherwise, why would the group have given up their one trump card – the 48 hostages?

Once they have gone, Hamas has no leverage at all. It has precious few friends among the countries sitting around the negotiating table, and it is a massively depleted fighting force.

So to give up that power, I can only assume that Khalil al-Hayya, the de facto Hamas leader, got a cast-iron guarantee of… something.

Arab states will greet this agreement with joy. Some of that is to do with empathy for the Palestinians in Gaza, where 67,000 people have been killed and more than 10% of the population has become a casualty of war.

But they will also welcome a path to stability, where there is less fear of spillover from the Gaza conflict and more confidence about the region’s economic and political unity.

Trump’s worldview – that everything comes down to business and deal-making – is welcomed by some of these leaders as a smart way of seeing diplomacy.

Jared Kushner has plenty of friends among these nations, and his input was important.

Read more about 7 October:
‘It is trauma’: Two lives torn apart
‘Instead of getting married, they got buried together’

For many Israelis, this comes down to a few crucial things. Firstly, the hostages are coming home. It is hard to overstate just how embedded that cause is to Israeli society.

The return of all 48, living and dead, will be a truly profound moment for this nation.

Secondly, their soldiers will no longer be fighting a war that, even within the higher echelons of the military, is believed to be drifting and purposeless.

Thirdly, there is growing empathy for the plight of the Gazans, which is tied to a fourth point – a realisation that Israel’s reputation on the world stage has been desperately tarnished.

Some will object to this deal and say that it is too weak; that it lets Hamas off the hook and fails to punish them for the atrocities of 7 October.

It is an accusation that will be levelled by far-right members of Netanyahu’s coalition government. It could even collapse the administration.

But for most people, in Israel, Gaza, across the Middle East and around the world, it is a moment of relief. Last week, I was in Gaza, and the destruction was absolutely devastating to witness.

Whatever the compromises, the idea that the war has stopped is, for the moment at least, a beacon of optimism.

Timing is everything.

This couldn’t be truer for the ceasefire deal to end the devastating war in Gaza.

More than 67,000 Palestinians are dead, virtually all of Gaza has been flattened by Israel’s bombing campaign, and disease and famine stalk the Strip.

Yet Hamas – the group still holding the 20 or so living hostages in captivity – is still not entirely defeated.

Yes, they are weakened immensely, but has Benjamin Netanyahu achieved the “total victory” over the group he set out to do two years ago? No.

So why has he suddenly agreed to a partial victory?

Speaking to those in the Israeli security establishment, one could develop a somewhat cynical view about his decision.

Recent leaks in the media around talks between Donald Trump and Israel’s prime minister, reports that the US president told Mr Netanyahu to “stop being so f***ing negative,” could be more coordinated than it seems at first glance, according to these conversations that I am having here in Israel.

It now suits Mr Netanyahu politically to stop the war.

For the past two years, he has needed to keep his coalition with the far right together to prevent his government from collapsing.

That meant continuing to pound Gaza, restricting the flow of aid, and allowing Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir to continue, unchecked, to fan the flames of ethnonationalism and call for the ethnic cleansing of the area.

Now, next year’s elections are honing into view.

Mr Netanyahu needs a win so he can go to his country as the statesman who got the hostages back and ended the war.

He needs external pressure from the US president to get this war done.

Don’t forget that, for Mr Trump, the timing is also key; the Nobel Peace Prize is announced on Friday and there is not much more that the president wants than to put the gong on his mantelpiece.

👉Listen to The World with Richard Engel and Yalda Hakim on your podcast app👈

Some pessimists said that Mr Netanyahu’s government would not last for days after the 7 October 2023 attacks because of the massive security failings.

After all, this is a country that punishes political leaders more harshly than most.

But two years later, Mr Netanyahu is still fighting.

Never mind that this deal looks a lot like the deal Joe Biden presented more than a year ago. The timing wasn’t right then, but it might be now.

The Palestinians living through sheer hell in Gaza desperately needed this deal to be finalised.

As did those Israelis with family still held captive by Hamas.

A dual hell for both sides, separated by mere miles, and dependent on a man who seems to have finally decided that the time for peace has come because it suits him.

As Israel and Hamas finally strike a deal aimed at bringing an end to the war in Gaza, we take a look at the hostages still believed to be alive and who are set to return home any day now.

Israel says that of the 250 initially taken captive in Hamas’s 7 October attack, 20 of the hostages that remain in Gaza are thought to be alive and 28 are dead.

As part of the first phase of the peace deal brokered by US President Donald Trump, some hostages will be released and Israeli soldiers will start withdrawing from Gaza.

On Thursday, Israel said the deal had been signed and the ceasefire would go into force within 24 hours of a cabinet meeting. After that period, the hostages in Gaza will be freed within 72 hours, an Israeli government spokeswoman said.

Here are the hostages believed to be alive and who could soon be returning home after two years of captivity in the besieged enclave of Gaza: