When US President Joe Biden prepared to step away from the podium after declaring a ceasefire deal in the Israel-Gaza war, he was asked a question by a waiting reporter that will undoubtedly define his legacy.
After Biden detailed the terms of an agreement 15 months in the making, the soon to be departed president was pressed on who would be credited in the history books for orchestrating the agreement.
Biden turned, smiled and replied: "Is that a joke?"
The dismissive answer followed months of quiet, painstaking work on behalf of the president and his administration.
Officials from the United States, Egypt and Qatar have delicately worked behind the scenes, sometimes against all odds, to broker peace between Israel and Hamas.
Each time it appeared as if the two parties were inching closer to an agreement, the deal would fall spectacularly apart.
Both sides have blamed each other for the delays in getting a deal over the line. Israel raised doubts about Hamas's willingness to compromise, while critics say that in recent months, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has repeatedly sought to change the goalposts.
The terms of this new agreement are not that different from eight months ago, when they were first presented in a proposal by Biden, but the passage of time has wrought a change in circumstances for both sides.
There was a period of great turmoil in the Middle East — assassinations, invasions and deaths. Then, in November, Americans voted to return Donald Trump to the White House.
"US pressure, coming from president Trump directly, I think has been a huge motivator, particularly on Prime Minister Netanyahu," Sanam Vakil, director of the Middle East and North Africa program at Chatham House told the Wall Street Journal.
"But this deal is very fragile."
Trump was quick to claim credit for the ceasefire agreement, announcing it well before official word came from the White House.
Biden, on the other hand, described the combined efforts of his and Trump's aides as the work of "one team".
The timing of the announcement is consequential for both men, falling just hours before Biden was set to deliver his final address from the Oval Office and days from Trump's re-entry into the White House.
It appears as if both the 46th and 47th presidents are staking their foreign policy legacies on the drawn-out agreement.
But their success relies on both Israel and Hamas committing to the ceasefire, a point that was tested barely 24 hours into the deal when Israel's hardline national security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, threatened to quit the government over the issue.
Months of negotiations now appear to hinge on the progression of a three-phase plan to end the war.
How upheaval in the Middle East made a ceasefire possible
The origins of the current ceasefire deal can be traced all the way back to almost the beginning of the war in Gaza.
After a temporary ceasefire between Israel and Hamas ended in December 2023, talks were held through January and into the early part of 2024, all with the aim of securing another short-term truce.
But no agreement was ever reached.
Instead, a working group of Israelis, Qataris, Egyptians and the US emerged from the process, paving the way for Biden to present a three-phase proposal in May 2024.
Israel and Hamas purportedly agreed to the overall framework, a senior White House source told the ABC, requesting to speak on background so he could speak freely.
But the militant group came back in July with what it called "response and acceptance" to the proposal, the senior source said, but which the US said was actually "a fundamental rewriting" of the deal.
The proposal kicked off another set of negotiations and by the middle of August, the US side felt they were seeing progress.
US officials put down a joint mediator proposal that Israel fully accepted and endorsed, the source said, and they had indications Hamas would also sign on.
It never progressed. By the end of the month, Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar made it clear he wasn't interested in a deal.
What followed was six months of chaos that reshaped the geopolitical landscape of the Middle East and forced both sides to re-evaluate their positions.
In September, Israel began ramping up its attacks on Hezbollah.
The Lebanese militant group launched rockets into Israel on October 8, 2023 — the day after the Hamas-led terrorist attack on the country's south.
Hezbollah vowed not to stop until there was a ceasefire in Gaza.
Israel is considered the most likely suspect behind Operation Grim Beeper, a coordinated explosion of pagers and electronic devices in Lebanon and Syria carried out on September 17 and 18, which killed Hezbollah operatives and hampered their ability to communicate in an audacious plot.
Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah was assassinated a week later and on October 1, Israel invaded southern Lebanon.
The marching of troops across the border was regarded as a dangerous escalation by Hezbollah's chief backer Iran, which responded with a ballistic missile attack that analysts feared would escalate into all out war.
Tensions were heightened as the world waited for Israel's response, the Middle East sitting on a knife's edge.
Then news arrived of Sinwar's death in Gaza.
The killing of the Hamas leader by Israel's Defense Forces (IDF) delivered a major blow to the militant group and was closely followed by Israel's high-stakes retaliation against Tehran, which involved a series of air strikes targeted at Iranian military sites.
On October 31, Amos Hochstein, an energy policy official who was born in Israel, and Brett McGurk, Biden's top Middle East adviser, met with Netanyahu to discuss the situation in the Middle East.
With Hezbollah significantly degraded by months of attack, a ceasefire with Lebanon was reached a month later.
By December, Israel and Hamas were back at the table for Gaza talks when the Bashar al-Assad regime collapsed in Syria and a new US president threatened to raise the stakes on ending the war.
A ticking clock at the White House hastens the deal
Things have a tendency to happen as the sun sets on a US president's time in office. There's an urgency for the outgoing administration to tie up loose ends before a new dawn rises over the next.
For the president facing imminent retirement, there are questions of legacy.
For politicians still in power, the entree of a new American president is sure to change everything — a fresh foreign policy doctrine, a new personality, new values system, new alliances — all of it forcing those with a seat at the table to sort things out before it's up-ended.
In January 1981, US president Jimmy Carter was preparing to leave office after one dramatic term, in which he was roundly blamed for the Iran hostage crisis.
Two years prior, 53 American citizens were taken hostage in Iran. The ensuing crisis and disastrous attempts to free them destroyed Carter's standing with the American public and led him to lose in a landslide to Ronald Reagan.
Republicans have often credited Reagan with the release of the hostages — just hours after he was sworn in on January 20, 1981 — claiming that Iran was frightened by this new no-nonsense leader, nothing at all like the "weak" Carter who allowed things to drag on too long.
But US journalist Mark Bowden believes Carter and Reagan played "good cop, bad cop" in negotiations with Iran, and used the looming change of administration as a tidy deadline to end the crisis.
"The Iranians were deliberately stalling," Bowden wrote in his book, Guests of the Ayatollah.
"They had decided to accept the deal and send the hostages home, but they had also decided to deny Carter the satisfaction of seeing it happen on his watch."
Four decades later, some Republicans have similarly credited Trump's threat that "all hell will break out in the Middle East" if the hostages weren't released by the time he took office with hastening a breakthrough.
"The Trump effect," incoming National Security Advisor Mike Waltz called it on social media.
In reality, a swirling nexus of mounting IDF casualties, increasing pressure on Netanyahu to release the hostages, and the ticking clock on the Biden administration forced all relevant parties into action.
"From the perspective of Israel's government, expectations that the incoming administration will offer strong support for Jerusalem on a host of issues — e.g. confronting Iran, cementing relations with Saudi Arabia, and supporting Jewish settlement in the West Bank —provided extra impetus to placate Trump," said Shalom Lipner, a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council's Scowcroft Middle East Security Initiative.
Meanwhile, Biden wanted one last win before leaving office, while Trump did not want to inherit the vexing question of what to do about this awful, seemingly intractable war.
And so, two men who have openly despised each other in the past directed their staff to work together to get this deal done.
Trump and Biden's teams 'deserve credit'
US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan and top Middle East adviser Brett McGurk started meeting with their successors on the Trump team, Mike Waltz and Steve Witkoff, to coordinate efforts.
After Christmas, everyone returned to the table for lengthy talks that sometimes lasted 18 hours a day or longer.
When Qatar Prime Minister Sheik Mohammed was asked what ultimately made the negotiations successful, he said: "in the past few days, there were serious efforts by all partners" to reach an agreement.
"The ironic reality is that at a time of heightened partisanship even over foreign policy, the deal represents how much more powerful and influential US foreign policy can be when it's bipartisan," Jonathan Panikoff, director of the Scowcroft Middle East Security Initiative at the Atlantic Council, told the Associated Press.
"Both the outgoing and incoming administration deserve credit for this deal and it would've been far less likely to happen without both pushing for it."
The agreement doesn't end the 15 months of war, but is instead the starting point for how the conflict could be wrapped up.
According to Sheikh Mohammed, the ceasefire deal involved three stages.
Initially, 33 of the 94 Israeli hostages thought to be in Gaza will be released — women, children, old men and those who are ill.
In return, Israel will free about 1,000 Palestinian prisoners.
A senior White House source who spoke on condition of anonymity told the ABC the IDF would withdraw from densely populated areas in Gaza during the first phase.
"This has all been mapped out," the source said.
"There are detailed maps in the agreement of where Israeli forces will go and where they will be."
They will pull back but remain in Gaza, creating a martial buffer between those returning to the area and nearby Israeli communities.
During the first phase, 600 aid trucks loaded with fuel, food and other essentials will be allowed into Gaza daily.
This first stage is due to run for six weeks.
While it is underway, there will be more talks to firm up conditions of the second part of the ceasefire deal.
In phase two, the remaining Israeli hostages would be freed, after which Israeli forces would fully withdraw from Gaza, Mr Biden said.
This second stage would be "a permanent end to the war," he said.
Under the third phase of the deal, the bodies of hostages would be returned to Israel.
It would also be the start of major works to rebuild Gaza, overseen by Egypt, Qatar and the UN.
It almost fell apart
While there were celebrations around the world immediately after the ceasefire was announced, Netanyahu cautioned that final details had to be determined.
The sticking point, according to Netanyahu, was the specifics around how a prisoner swap would play out.
He had accused Hamas of backflipping on terms under which Israel could block the release of some Palestinian prisoners.
This is likely a sore point for Israel as Sinwar was once an Israeli prisoner himself, serving multiple life sentences for offences including the abduction and murder of two Israelis in 1988.
He was released in 2011, under a deal Netanyahu agreed to in which 1,027 Palestinian and Israeli-Arab prisoners were exchanged for an Israeli soldier, Gilad Shalit, who had been captured and held hostage by Hamas.
Sinwar went back to his old ways, and by 2017 was Hamas chief in Gaza.
Israeli forces eventually killed him during an operation in Rafah a little more than a year after the October 7 attacks.
With lingering concerns from Israel about exactly who would be released, Netanyahu had to convince people like far-right hardliner Itamar Ben-Gvir to for the deal to be realised.
There have also been protests against the deal by some Israelis, who blocked traffic and clashed with police.
But after one failed bid to secure backing for the deal, Israeli media reported on Friday that it had been signed.
Even with the ceasefire now likely to come in, critics believe it is far from a lasting solution to the conflict, and will likely only provide temporary relief for the millions of people suffering in Gaza.
Panikoff said longer-term goals such as "the reconstruction of Gaza, the security of Israel, and the future of normalisation all remain unclear."
"The ceasefire has multiple stages that if broken could result in a resumption of fighting," he said.
"But the reality is that Hamas is battered and much of the group's leadership has long sought an end to the conflict.
"In Israel, the Netanyahu government is also unlikely to break the ceasefire."
The ceasefire is expected to begin on Sunday (local time).
"Today, most people in Gaza will simply rejoice at not having to fear explosions from Israeli missiles and gunfire," Panikoff said.
"And in Israel, most will rejoice in the knowledge that the hostages, at long last, will come home."
