Biden was right to stand by Israel and pressure Hamas. As is Trump.

We have been criticized for failing to adequately pressure Israel to end the war in Gaza — a war that Hamas itself started on Oct. 7, 2023. But throughout the ceasefire negotiations, Hamas consistently held back on a commitment to release hostages and aimed to ensure it remained in power after the war ends. These latest threats are part of the same pattern. President Joe Biden was right to stand firmly by Israel and demand the release of hostages by Hamas. And President Donald Trump is right to do the same.

Hamas is a terrorist group that has ruled the Gaza Strip for nearly two decades. Its Oct. 7 attack, however, was not just an act of terrorism but a full-blown military invasion. More than 3,000 Hamas fighters in military formations attacked on multiple fronts, with a mission to inflict mass casualties and to take hostages, including mothers and toddlers, back inside Gaza to deter an Israeli response. In the days after the assault, as much of the world reeled in horror, with more than 1,000 people in Israel dead and 250 others taken hostage, Israel’s enemies, led by Iran, chose instead to back Hamas and seek advantage from Israel’s vulnerability.

This led Biden to warn publicly at the time, “To anyone thinking of taking advantage of this situation … don’t!” — and to order an early surge of defensive U.S. naval and air assets to the region.

At first, it seemed that the president’s warning would go unheeded. On Oct. 8, the leader of Hezbollah, Hasan Nasrallah, ordered daily rocket launches from Lebanon into Israel, and later pledged to render northern Israel — home to hundreds of thousands of civilians — uninhabitable until Israel granted a permanent ceasefire to Hamas. Nearly 80,000 Israelis were ultimately displaced from these areas. At the same time, Iranian-backed groups in Iraq and Syria launched regular drone attacks against Israel with the same demands, soon joined by the Houthis in Yemen, which began firing Iranian-supplied missiles at Israeli cities.

Hamas, meanwhile, retreated into hundreds of miles of tunnels under Gaza, a labyrinth built solely for itself under cities packed with civilians with nowhere to go. Hamas’s leaders pledged to repeat the October massacres and reportedly welcomed the civilian toll in Gaza to increase pressure on Israel. A U.S.-mediated deal to release hostages in exchange for a ceasefire broke down less than two months into the crisis when Hamas refused to free young women it had agreed to release. Hamas then rejected continuing talks unless Israel accepted a permanent truce up front, with a return to the Oct. 6 status quo. Hamas’s Iranian backers reinforced the group’s demands as it continued to attack Israel.

This was the situation the White House confronted in the weeks and months after Oct. 7, 2023: a multifront war against Israel and a demand by Iran and the terrorist groups it supported across the region that the only way to stop the fighting was for Israel to accept all of Hamas’s terms. Calls to restrict weapons shipments to Israel, or to increase pressure on Israel (as opposed to those who kept attacking it), or to back U.N. Security Council resolutions demanding “unconditional” ceasefires with Hamas, discounted this regional equation and the intent of Israel’s adversaries. Heeding such calls would have done nothing to stop the war. It would have instead led to an even longer and costlier one.

Therefore, we in the Biden administration concluded that the only way to realistically wind down the war was through firm support for Israel, while we worked on a ceasefire deal to release hostages on terms not dictated by Hamas, and sought to mitigate the humanitarian consequences of the war. Biden laid out our vision in a national address on May 31 of last year — a three-phase deal to free the most vulnerable hostages first, with the rest, particularly male Israeli soldiers, freed in a second phase after conditions were agreed upon. Those conditions would, critically, need to include a postwar Gaza without Hamas in charge.

While Hamas and its defenders claim it accepted this framework in early July, that is not true. Hamas reinserted demands for a permanent truce. And in those negotiations, it never — not once, even where nearly every other detail seemed locked down — agreed to a list of hostages that it would release if a ceasefire was agreed.

That was the situation during talks in Cairo and in Doha, Qatar, that I helped lead over the course of the summer last year. Hamas only engaged seriously on issues it cared about, such as Israel’s military positions during a ceasefire, or mechanisms at border crossings. It refused to engage seriously on the essence of the deal: the hostages to be released during the ceasefire. Nor did Hamas seem to care about the civilians of Gaza, whose suffering would be greatly alleviated by a stop to the fighting and the surge in humanitarian supplies that the ceasefire would enable.

One of the hostages on the list Hamas refused to accept was a young American citizen, Hersh Goldberg-Polin, who lost his hand while protecting his friends during the Oct. 7 attacks. On Aug. 31, Hamas brutally murdered Goldberg-Polin and five other hostages in a tunnel beneath Rafah in southern Gaza. I received the news of Goldberg-Polin’s death shortly after arriving back in Washington after a round of talks between Doha and Cairo. The news was devastating. And it again showed that Hamas had no serious intent to release hostages so long as Iran and Hezbollah backed its maximalist demands with ongoing attacks against Israel.

Later that day, I and other senior advisers met with Biden at the White House and agreed to flip the script by freezing the talks and supporting Israel’s campaign against Hamas’s backers.

Two weeks later, Israel, with U.S. backing, turned north to Lebanon, where it decimated Hezbollah, killed its leader, Nasrallah, and with U.S. mediation, forged a ceasefire that severed Hezbollah’s support for Hamas in Gaza. Around the same time, Hamas’s leader Yahya Sinwar — the mastermind of the Oct. 7 attacks, and an obstacle to any hostage deal — was killed in southern Gaza, not far from where Goldberg-Polin died. Iran sought to regain the initiative on Oct. 26, firing nearly 200 ballistic missiles toward Israel — the largest ballistic missile attack in history. U.S. and Israeli forces defeated that attack, and Israel soon responded with an attack of its own, eliminating Iran’s strategic air defenses, and its capacity to produce new missiles, leaving Iran militarily exposed. Soon after, the Assad regime collapsed in Syria after being abandoned by a weakened Iran and a Russia tied down in Ukraine, severing Iran’s main smuggling routes for arming Hezbollah.

The final stages of talks that began in December took place with the backdrop of a transformed Middle East, delivering on Biden’s warning (“Don’t!”). To show additional resoluteness, Biden and his incoming successor, Trump, agreed to join forces in the closing weeks, aiming to secure a ceasefire before the presidential transition. Jake Sullivan, Biden’s national security adviser, soon met with Michael Waltz, his named successor, together with me and my successor, Steve Witkoff, to map out the path from a Lebanon ceasefire to a Gaza deal. This unprecedented partnership between incoming and outgoing administrations helped close the final terms on Jan. 15 in Doha. By Jan. 19, one day before Trump’s inauguration, the ceasefire took effect, and hostages began to come home.

The talks ultimately succeeded because the military equation across the region changed, with Hamas isolated and no longer able to count on a multifront conflict. Indeed, it was not until late December that Hamas finally named the hostages it was holding and began to engage seriously on the terms for their release under the framework Biden had presented in May. This change in position came not from forceful diplomacy alone, but also from force of arms across the Middle East.

None of this should discount the horrors of this war, and the suffering of the civilians of Gaza, or the families of those lost in Israel, or in Lebanon, or elsewhere. But in the end, there was no shortcut to ending the war absent Hamas releasing hostages.

Today, Israel is increasingly secure, with a ceasefire deal and a new government in Lebanon, Iran at its weakest position in decades, and the Assad regime gone in Syria. And America’s partnerships in the region are as strong as ever. All this was achieved without the United States being drawn directly into an all-out Middle East war that so many analysts had predicted. The course set by the Biden administration early in the crisis proved right — and provided the Trump administration a strong hand to carry forward.

The Gaza ceasefire is now in its fourth week, but remains precarious. Earlier this week, Hamas threatened to stop freeing hostages altogether, days after parading three emaciated Israelis before thousands of well-armed Hamas militants moments prior to their release. Trump declared the ceasefire ends if Hamas carried through on its threat. Hamas on Thursday backtracked, and hostages are scheduled to be released on Saturday as planned.

Trump was right to call their bluff. The deal is the deal. And the formula today is the same as it’s been since Oct. 7, 2023. The only way to end this war is for Hamas to continue releasing hostages and accept terms for a future that might allow Israelis and Palestinians to live side by side in peace. That means a Gaza without Hamas in charge.

If Hamas cannot do that, even as Israel is meeting its essential commitments under the deal, then the war could restart. That would be tragic, but the responsibility would rest with Hamas.