Josh Glancy in the Times interviews Brett McGurk, the American who tried to negotiate the release of kidnapped Israelis:
In August 2024, an end to the war in Gaza seemed agonisingly close. Brett McGurk, point man on the Middle East for President Biden, had helped drag the various parties to within touching distance of a deal. Hundreds of Palestinian prisoners would be exchanged for the remaining hundred or so hostages in Gaza. Border crossings would be reopened. Gazans would be able to return home. A ceasefire beckoned.
Then McGurk received a call from William Burns, director of the CIA. Six Israeli hostages had been found slain in a tunnel under Rafah, all of them shot multiple times.
These deaths were not a tragic accident. After the bodies were found, Hamas released propaganda videos showing some of the hostages speaking their final words. A film of one, Hersh Goldberg-Polin, urging his parents to stay strong, was released during his funeral.
The deal was doomed — and McGurk realised that a major shift would now be required for the war to end. The Americans should “walk away until [Yahya] Sinwar is dead”, he told Biden. As long as the October 7 mastermind was alive, there would be no agreement. “We don’t have a plan B,” said Burns.
But of course it wasn’t just Sinwar. He was later killed by the Israelis, but there are hundreds, thousands more, just like him. That’s the point. It wasn’t just the odd psychopath running Hamas: it’s the whole organisation.
However obstinate and tricky he found Netanyahu, Hamas were a tougher proposition. When the war’s first ceasefire and hostage exchange ended on December 1, 2023, it was because Hamas refused to release the young female hostages that were due to come out next. McGurk reflects on a dark rationale for this reluctance, which emerged when the women were finally released and described sexual assaults in captivity.
The stuff no one wants to talk about. The rapes. The sexual abuse.
On other occasions, Hamas refused to provide complete lists of which hostages it was willing to release. “At times it was me and just a few people in a room, as close as anyone in the world to ending this defining crisis,” says McGurk. “You thought, ‘There has to be a key we can turn’ — but it proved exceedingly difficult.”
McGurk observes that we in the West often view the war exclusively through the lens of Israel’s conduct, a mistake that can embolden Hamas. “Israel did plenty that you can criticise, but sometimes Hamas is almost written out of the story,” he says.
That much has been blindingly obvious right from the start, as major news organisations like the BBC parroted Hamas propaganda, painting the Palestinians always as the hapless victims of Israeli cruelty.
“They were a principal actor with agency. Sinwar spent 20 years preparing for this, building a military infrastructure under Gaza. It’s really hard to fully appreciate what that labyrinth was like. There’s never been a military conflict with something like this, ever. Sinwar made clear that civilians cannot go into those tunnels.”
There was never a military conflict like this, where one side factored in the deaths of tens of thousands of Gaza civilians as simply expendable “martyrs” for the cause, while the other side went out of its way to minimise civilian casualties. Of course it’s Israel now which is accused of genocide.
Much of the problem is that people simply refuse to believe quite how cynical and, yes, depraved, groups like Hamas really are. Far easier instead to cover it all in a feel-good coat of old-style liberation and anti-colonialist struggle nonsense than face the reality of the hard-line Islamist ideology that Israel has been facing for decades, and may soon be coming our way.
McGurk’s book, Brink: Inside the Race to Free the October 7th Hostages, is out shortly.
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