As Jerusalem prepares to discuss Phase 2 of the ceasefire with Hamas, Brett McGurk, who led ceasefire negotiations for the Biden White House, offered rare insight into Israel-Hamas dealmaking, blaming the terrorist group for the failure of talks during the previous administration, in a Feb. 14 Washington Post op-ed.
McGurk, who served as deputy assistant to the president and White House coordinator for the Middle East and North Africa, bolstered Israel’s claim that Hamas’s intransigence was the reason a deal couldn’t be reached.
Since the start of the war, families of hostages, and the Hostage and Missing Families Forum, the group that represents most of them (for four months led by an anti-Netanyahu media strategist), blamed the prime minister and his government for the failure of talks.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu continues to face criticism on the issue. Most recently, a senior Israeli security official told Ynet on Sunday that Netanyahu is torpedoing negotiations for Phase 2 of the deal.
And on Saturday, Brig. Gen. (res.) Oren Setter, who resigned from the negotiating team in October, told Channel 12 that Israel hadn’t done everything it could to bring the hostages home, and had missed two windows of opportunity, one in March and the other in July 2024.
However, McGurk wrote on Friday that throughout the ceasefire negotiations mediated by the United States, Qatar and Egypt, “Hamas consistently held back on a commitment to release hostages and aimed to ensure it remained in power after the war ends.”
With the backing of Iran and others, Hamas retreated to its tunnel system to continue to wage war against Israel following its Oct. 7, 2023, attack, he said.
His comments support those of former U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who told The New York Times on July 4 that Hamas had refused to agree to release the hostages in exchange for a ceasefire.
(Blinken also revealed that U.S. pressure on Israel began immediately after Oct. 7, 2023, and became a central feature of U.S. policy in relation to the war from its very earliest days.)
McGurk said, “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,” he added.
With Iran and terrorist groups calling for Israel to accept all of Hamas’s terms, along with demands in the West to restrict weapons shipments to Israel, and to increase pressure on Israel, or support anti-Israel U.N. Security Council resolutions, the Biden administration decided that “heeding such calls would have done nothing to stop the war. It would have instead led to an even longer and costlier one,” McGurk wrote.
Never agreed to a list of hostages
U.S. President Joe Biden president presented a ceasefire plan on May 31, 2024, involving a three-phase deal to free the most vulnerable hostages and then the rest, mainly male Israeli soldiers, in a second phase with conditions that would include a postwar Gaza free of Hamas control, he said.
“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,” he said.
McGurk, who helped lead talks in Cairo and in Doha in the summer of 2024, said Hamas only took seriously issues “it cared about,” such as Israel’s military arrangement or 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,” he added.
On Aug. 31, after news of the murder of dual U.S.-Israeli citizen Hersh Goldberg-Polin and other hostages by Hamas, McGurk and other advisers met with Biden and agreed to freeze talks and support Israel’s campaign against Hamas’s supporters.
What followed was the devastation of Hezbollah, the killing of Hamas leader in Gaza Yahya Sinwar, Israel’s successful defense against an Iranian missile attack on Oct. 26 and its counterstrike that destroyed Iran’s air defenses.
Force of arms left Hamas isolated, leading the terrorist group to finally approach talks seriously, and even then, not until December, McGurk said.
In the final weeks of the Biden administration, he and National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan met with their successors to outline a way toward 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,” McGurk said.
McGurk defended his administration’s approach, saying that Israel is more secure with its ceasefire deal with Lebanon, and Iran is at its weakest in decades.
“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,” he said.
U.S. President Donald Trump was right to call Hamas’s bluff when it threatened to delay the return of hostages on Saturday, he said. If Hamas breaks the deal, war may restart. “That would be tragic, but the responsibility would rest with Hamas,” McGurk said.