Former Biden Official: Hamas, Not Netanyahu, Blocked Hostage Deals

Brett McGurk, a senior Biden administration official, challenged a long list of claims and myths today (Monday) about the hostage deal. McGurk, who served as the U.S. National Security Council coordinator for Middle East countries,  spoke on Dan Senor’s podcast and raised several points related to the negotiations that were underway at the time to free hostages from Gaza.

Channel 12 news analyst Amit Segal was the first to transcribe the podcast and McGurk’s five main points.

“Everyone could have been brought back almost immediately,” McGurk: “Complete bullshit.” According to him, a comprehensive deal in the early stages would effectively have required surrendering to Hamas’s terms, and even then there was no reason to assume Hamas would release everyone. The American assessment was that Hamas intended to keep some of the hostages for years as bargaining chips.

The first deal collapsed because of Hamas, and the dispute was over the young women: McGurk said Hamas tried to move on to releasing older men, even though it was still holding young women alive. From Israel’s perspective, agreeing to skip over them could have been a death sentence for them. Israel therefore insisted on completing that category, and Hamas stopped the releases.

Before the entry into Rafah, there was no deal Hamas was prepared to accept: According to McGurk, Israel agreed to several very difficult frameworks, including the release of high-profile prisoners, and Hamas rejected them. Hamas also did not accept the Israeli framework announced by Biden. McGurk stressed: “There was no moment before Rafah when a deal was truly within reach. Moreover, Hamas would have waited years before releasing everyone.”

Biden’s pressure to stop before Rafah did not stem from Israel having sabotaged a deal, according to McGurk; Biden had simply reached a point of exhaustion with the war and the regional crisis. The U.S. pushed to reduce the fighting during Ramadan, a move that McGurk says actually reduced Hamas’s incentive to become more flexible in negotiations.

Sinwar and military pressure were the key: McGurk said that as long as Yahya Sinwar was alive, he did not see a real possibility for a deal, including in the killing of the six hostages that was presented as their sacrifice by the government. The entry into Rafah was part of the move that ultimately led to Sinwar’s elimination, and, in his words, “military pressure is what brought Hamas to the point at which it agreed to deals. From his perspective, military pressure and a hostage deal were not alternatives; the pressure was the leverage that made the deals possible.”

It can now be revealed that McGurk was the “senior official” who spoke two years ago and was not widely quoted in Israel because his remarks did not align with the line taken by the government’s opponents. McGurk told several well-known Israeli journalists at the time that there was no deal because of Hamas, and that at no stage was there a situation in which a deal was rejected because of Netanyahu. He has now said the same things in his own voice on Senor’s podcast.