An eerie quiet as Biden races to silence the guns in Gaza

 A cease-fire deal is tantalizingly close, but negotiations are stalled.

By David Ignatius

In the Middle East, the silence is deafening. A Gaza cease-fire deal is tantalizingly close, but negotiations are stalled. The risk of a devastating war between Israel and Iran has lessened, but the guns are still locked and loaded.

It’s an anxious, agonizing moment — balanced between a breakthrough toward peace and a new plunge toward catastrophe. It’s eerie: Everywhere you look, you see dogs that aren’t barking.

In this fog of negotiation, what’s really going on? Answering that question is always risky in the Middle East, but I can share what I’m hearing from U.S. and Israeli officials who are closely monitoring the crisis. They describe a basket of diplomatic and military issues that are still unresolved — and the challenges for President Joe Biden and his team over the next week.

The first big problem, officials say, is that Hamas has been silent on the “bridging proposal” that U.S. mediators crafted to resolve disagreements over a proposed 45-day cease-fire and release of Israeli hostages. U.S. officials said Wednesday they’ve been waiting four days for Hamas to answer basic questions, such as the names of the hostages who will be released.

U.S. officials think Hamas leader Yehiya Sinwar, trapped underground in Gaza and running out of ammunition and supplies, favors the deal. In addition to halting Israel’s onslaught, it would mean the release of hundreds of Palestinians from Israeli prisons, evacuation of wounded Hamas fighters and blessed relief for Palestinian civilians after 10 months of terrible suffering.

But Hamas seems to be playing a waiting game, probably in the hope that Iran or Hezbollah will attack Israel — and thereby transform the battlefield. Iran seems likely to disappoint Hamas. U.S. officials believe Iranian leaders have decided to delay taking revenge for the assassination in Tehran of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh late last month.

The good news is that Iran seems to have been deterred by a massive American show of force. The bad news is that Tehran is goading its proxy Hezbollah to attack, U.S. officials fear.

What would Hezbollah do? U.S. officials believe that Hasan Nasrallah, the group’s leader, might have stepped back from a plan to fire a barrage of missiles at Tel Aviv, which could have triggered a region-wide catastrophe. But Nasrallah has vowed to avenge the Israeli assassination last month of Fuad Shukr, his top military commander. And he has many Israeli targets to choose from.

The other vexing problem facing U.S. mediators is that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been slow-walking the negotiations. On Wednesday, U.S. officials credited Netanyahu for offering some concessions in a phone call with Biden, including a map showing where Israel proposes to deploy forces in the “Philadelphi Corridor” along the Egypt-Gaza border.

But Netanyahu still talks of an “absolute victory” over Hamas that his military commanders say is unrealistic. And he has been fixated on the corridor, insisting it’s not one of the “densely populated” areas of Gaza that Israel agreed to leave. But during a visit to the corridor Wednesday, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant seemed to downplay the threat there. He told Israeli troops that the Rafah Brigade, Hamas’s last remaining fighting force in southern Gaza, had been “defeated,” according to his spokesman.

The American mediating team has been led by CIA Director William J. Burns and Brett McGurk, the National Security Council’s Middle East director. They’ve worked closely with Egyptian intelligence chief Abbas Kamel and Qatari Prime Minister Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani, who have been intermediaries with Hamas. The mediators are planning to gather Thursday in Cairo to discuss how to increase pressure on Hamas.

A new twist in the diplomacy is that Mohammed plans to visit Tehran on Monday to meet with Masoud Pezeshkian, Iran’s new president. If the Iranians want de-escalation in the region, this is definitely the moment.

Stopping the Gaza nightmare is the biggest challenge facing Biden in his remaining months in office. The pieces are in place. His team has crafted a three-stage peace plan that, if embraced, could begin a real process of reconstruction and recovery in Gaza. He has dispatched a U.S. armada to the region that appears to have deterred Iran. Gallant has told U.S. officials that it was the biggest American military effort to aid Israel since the 1973 Arab-Israeli War.

Now is Biden’s moment. He needs to push Israel and Hamas to close the deal. If he succeeds, it would be one of the most significant achievements of his presidency.