Perspective with Heather du Plessis-Allan: Trump does deserve credit for the Gaza agreement

So, what happened last night is remarkable.

Before the deadline of 10pm New Zealand time, 20 living Israeli hostages - who had been held for 2 years, who had been forced in some cases to dig their own graves, spend unknown lengths of time in tunnels underground, and go without much in the way of sustenance at times - were handed over by their captors back into the care of Israel, which is their home.

That is remarkable. Because, I mean, let's be honest about it - in the last two years, there were times where surely we started to believe that we'd seen the last of the survivors make it out.

Surely, we'd assumed most, if not all, of the remaining 20 would die in captivity in the years that we may have thought stretched ahead of us.

But look at what's happened, aid is now flowing back into Gaza, people are going back to their homes - whatever is left of it - and the shelling has stopped.

You would think this would be a moment to celebrate, right? The very thing that so many of us have been calling for for such a long time and increasingly in the last few months has happened. The fighting has stopped, the starvation has stopped.

But where is the celebration? I mean, don't you think it's remarkably muted today?

Now I realize a lot of that will be that there is some weariness, quite rightly, over whether this peace can hold because so many ceasefires have broken down in the past, and there are so many ways that this ceasefire can break down.

It could be a rocket fired in error, it could be Hamas still refusing to disarm, it could be anything.

But I do wonder if part of it is also because it's hard for some people to give credit to Donald Trump for the role that he played in this.

I mean, already there are opinion pieces that are writing him out of this historic moment and talking up the diplomatic efforts of others, particularly in the Middle East, and warning he will never get a Nobel Peace Prize for this, regardless of whether this peace holds.

But you can't ignore his role in this and you can't write him out of this. He was instrumental in a way that Biden never was.

And it was for various reasons, mainly because of his friendship with Benjamin Netanyahu - which Biden never had - but also because of his relationship with the Arab countries because of previous work in the region, in his first administration, like the Abraham Accords.

Now, let's be fair, it's always hard to give credit to people we dislike.

It's also very hard to give credit to people who are so capable of dishing out copious amounts of credit to themselves, like Donald Trump.

But Trump does deserve credit and he deserves a lot of it for getting the Gaza conflict to a point that it has never been before, which is that all the living hostages are out.

LISTEN ABOVE

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.