Supporters and family members of hostages kidnapped during the deadly Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel by Hamas, hold lit torches during a protest ahead of a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, in Tel Aviv, Israel, Jan. 16, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Shir Torem

For much of the past three years, the argument over Gaza has been polluted by claims repeated with such frequency that repetition itself began to substitute for evidence: Hamas was ready to release the hostages from day one; Israel broke the November 2023 truce; Hamas accepted the major ceasefire proposals that followed; Benjamin Netanyahu blocked every serious route to an agreement; more American pressure on Israel would have produced a deal sooner.

Some of the people repeating these claims were merely ignorant. Others had access to enough information to know that the picture was considerably less convenient. My current government in the UK perhaps absorbed a few of them when designing its viciously anti-Israel foreign policy.

So, it is important that Brett McGurk has now spoken directly to many of these stupid theories and debunked them. He was President Biden’s senior White House official for the Middle East and one of the principal American officials responsible for the hostage negotiations. In his new long interview with Dan Senor on the “Call Me Back” podcast, he reveals the truths that many of us already knew, reinforcing them with the authority that can only be delivered by someone who was actually in the room. How inconvenient for all the conspiracy theorists.

McGurk worked with William Burns, Jake Sullivan, and Biden himself, dealt directly with Netanyahu and senior Israeli officials, and with the Qataris and Egyptians carrying messages to and from Hamas. He saw the proposals, the amendments, the delays and the refusals. He is a cross-party American national-security official with unusually direct knowledge of the talks.

Begin with one of the most persistent claims pushed by activists and some journalists: that Hamas was ready, early on, to release the hostages. McGurk’s verdict is blunt: “It’s complete bullshit.” Hamas was prepared to talk, but on terms no Israeli government could conceivably accept: “You can have the hostages … in exchange for all Palestinian prisoners and we stay in power,” alongside a “permanent ceasefire, Oct. 6 status quo,” and the right to “reconstitute on Israel’s borders.”

Even the first, narrower agreement over women and children was brutally difficult. Hamas initially claimed it could identify only 20 hostages and needed a ceasefire to find the rest. McGurk says the Israelis thought that was “BS” too, because subsequent evidence showed that “Hamas took very careful records of who the hostages are and had pretty good accounting.” Netanyahu, far from trying to kill the negotiation, pulled McGurk aside and told him: “Brett, I need this deal. Help me get it.” When McGurk suggested trying to move Hamas from 20 guaranteed hostages to 30, Netanyahu told him to demand 50. They eventually got 50.

The deal was for all women and children. By day eight, around a hundred hostages had come out, but Hamas stopped releasing the younger women and suggested skipping instead to older men. Israel told the mediators that even one additional woman would keep the ceasefire going. Hamas produced none. McGurk describes the Israeli decision as unanimous: Moving on would amount to “signing their death sentence.” The war resumed that night. Romi Gonen, Doron Steinbrecher and Emily Damari, later released in January 2025, were among the women who, as McGurk says, “should have come out in November.”

Nor does McGurk leave much room for the fashionable theory that Hamas always intended to trade the hostages quickly. His assessment of Yahya Sinwar’s strategy is almost the reverse. He believed Hamas expected the war to end with it “holding a number of hostages, meaning indefinitely, or for years.” The precedent was obvious. Gilad Shalit had been held for five years and exchanged for more than a thousand Palestinian prisoners, among them Sinwar himself.

Brett McGurk during an interview in October 2026. Photo: Screenshot

The May 2024 proposal disposes of another durable falsehood. Biden publicly presented a detailed, four-page, three-phase ceasefire agreement. McGurk clarifies, “Netanyahu … said yes.” The UN Security Council endorsed it unanimously. Hamas then failed to answer for five weeks. When it eventually announced to the world that it had accepted the proposal, McGurk says it had done no such thing: Its response contained “a number of poison pills.”

By August, the American proposal had moved further “in the direction of Hamas” than the May proposal and, McGurk says, went “about 80 percent of the way there,” with withdrawal maps, details of the Philadelphi Corridor, and the prisoner exchanges all set out. Qatar and Egypt backed it. Once again, everyone waited for Hamas. Then six hostages, including Hersh Goldberg-Polin, Carmel Gat, and Eden Yerushalmi, were found dead beneath Rafah. Their names had been on McGurk’s list for release. Hamas’s response was to rub salt in Israel’s wound by releasing propaganda videos of the dead around the time of their funerals.

His testimony is equally awkward for those who spent the war demanding ever more public American pressure on Israel, as though this could only have helped the negotiations. McGurk says the US abstention on a Security Council resolution calling for an unconditional Ramadan ceasefire, seen as a tough move aimed at Israel, “played back extremely negatively in the hostage talks.” Hamas leaders celebrated and “basically doubled down on their demands.” His description of the result is worth remembering: “performative diplomacy producing no outcome whatsoever. In fact, producing negative outcomes.” The very public dispute over Israel’s plans to enter Rafah had a similar effect. Sinwar, McGurk notes, was in Rafah, consumed media, and could see the threatened divide between Washington and Jerusalem. McGurk is unequivocal that this “definitely played back into the hostage negotiation.”

There were those who demanded Biden should simply cut Israel off militarily, to help end the war. McGurk’s answer is direct: “That would not have ended the war. It would not have gotten any hostages home.” Israel had its own substantial arms industry and, after ct. 7, an overwhelming domestic consensus that Hamas could no longer govern Gaza. McGurk stresses that this was not merely Netanyahu’s position. He recalls meeting Benny Gantz, Gadi Eisenkot, and others and finding “unanimous consensus on that point.”

This does not turn every Israeli decision into the correct one, and McGurk does not pretend that it does. He describes serious disputes over Rafah, humanitarian failures, arguments over prisoner releases, and profound disagreements inside the Biden administration.

What his testimony demolishes, however, is the infantile morality play imposed on an extraordinarily difficult negotiation: Hamas forever offering peace and hostages, Netanyahu forever refusing them, and Western pressure on Israel forever representing the missing ingredient that might have ended the war.

The record McGurk describes is the near opposite. Hamas withheld hostages it had agreed to release. It delayed responses for weeks. It publicly claimed to accept proposals it had materially rewritten. It calculated that fractures between Washington and Jerusalem might improve its leverage. It intended, in McGurk’s judgement, to keep some hostages for years. Much of this was visible at the time. What McGurk supplies now is something much harder to wave away: the testimony of the man who saw the proposals, sat through the negotiations, heard the demands, and watched the responses arrive.

Now we know, and it’s time we ask why so many were willing to believe the distortions of the Islamist, Muslim Brotherhood Hamas over the more logical and believable interpretations which did not vilify the Jewish state. I think we already know why.