Biden’s Mideast czar says Trump ‘right to stand firmly by Israel’ on hostage deal
In first op-ed since leaving government, senior diplomat Brett McGurk defends previous administration’s handling of Gaza truce talks, says Hamas consistently blocked agreement
Jacob Magid is The Times of Israel's US bureau chief
Former White House Mideast czar Brett McGurk last week penned his first op-ed since leaving government, taking the opportunity to defend the Biden administration’s handling of the hostage negotiations and insisting that Hamas was consistently the obstacle to an agreement.
“We have been criticized for failing to adequately pressure Israel to end the war in Gaza — a war that Hamas itself started on October 7, 2023. But throughout the ceasefire negotiations, Hamas consistently held back on a commitment to release hostages and aimed to ensure it remained in power after the war ends,” McGurk wrote in a Washington Post article published Friday.
“These latest threats (from Hamas not to release hostages) are part of the same pattern. President Joe Biden was right to stand firmly by Israel and demand the release of hostages by Hamas. And President Donald Trump is right to do the same,” McGurk argued.
He said that Iran had sought to take advantage of Israel’s vulnerability after Hamas’s October 7 onslaught, which led president Joe Biden to warn adversaries not to take advantage of the situation, in addition to significantly bolstering US troop presence in the region.
Throughout the ensuing campaign in Gaza, the US faced the potential of a multi-front Mideast war, mounting pressure for Israel to accept a ceasefire on Hamas’s terms, calls to restrict aid to Israel, and efforts to isolate Jerusalem in international forums.
“Heeding such calls would have done nothing to stop the war. It would have instead led to an even longer and costlier one,” McGurk argued. “Therefore, we in the Biden administration concluded that the only way to realistically wind down the war was through firm support for Israel, while we worked on a ceasefire deal to release hostages on terms not dictated by Hamas and sought to mitigate the humanitarian consequences of the war.”
He denied claims that Hamas in early July accepted the ceasefire proposal outlined by Biden in late May, insisting that the Palestinian terror group had doubled down on its demand for an upfront Israeli commitment to permanently end the war, while refusing to provide a list of hostages that it would be releasing.
Officials from Qatar, Egypt, and even from Israel’s negotiating team have said that Hamas did, in fact, come down from its main demands in July, and that, over the summer, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had become the main obstacle to a deal by adding conditions regarding Israel’s withdrawal from key areas of Gaza.
McGurk said that Hamas’s late August execution of American-Israeli captive Hersh Goldberg-Polin along with five other hostages “showed that Hamas had no serious intent to release hostages so long as Iran and Hezbollah backed its maximalist demands with ongoing attacks against Israel.”
It was at that point that the US decided to “flip the script” by freezing the negotiations and instead doubling down in its support of Israel’s military campaign against Hamas and its backers, McGurk said.
The following weeks saw Israel take out Hamas’s leaders, while massively intensifying its military campaign against Hezbollah to the point where the Lebanon-based terror group agreed to retreat from its pledge not to accept a ceasefire in Lebanon before one was reached in Gaza.
The US, also during that time, helped Israel thwart a second missile attack from Iran and guided its response that saw the dismantlement of Tehran’s air defense system. Shortly thereafter, the Assad regime collapsed in Syria, when neither Iran nor Russia came to its aid.
McGurk argued that the hostage talks were then able to move forward and succeed because the “military equation across the region changed, with Hamas isolated and no longer able to count on a multi-front conflict.”
At this point fully a lame duck, after then-US vice president Kamala Harris lost the election to US President Donald Trump, Biden directed his aides to closely coordinate with the incoming administration in order to close the hostage deal, which was inked last month.
“None of this should discount the horrors of this war, and the suffering of the civilians of Gaza, or the families of those lost in Israel, or in Lebanon, or elsewhere. But in the end, there was no shortcut to ending the war absent Hamas releasing hostages,” McGurk maintained in the op-ed.
He argued that the previous administration’s policy had left Israel in a much more secure position, while Iran was the weakest it had been in decades.
McGurk hailed Trump’s firm response to Hamas’s threat not to release any hostages last week, which he said led the terror group to backtrack.
“The only way to end this war is for Hamas to continue releasing hostages and accept terms for a future that might allow Israelis and Palestinians to live side by side in peace. That means a Gaza without Hamas in charge,” McGurk wrote. “If Hamas cannot do that, even as Israel is meeting its essential commitments under the deal, then the war could restart. That would be tragic, but the responsibility would rest with Hamas.”
Notably, he made no mention of the Palestinian Authority, which the Biden administration argued represented the only viable alternative to Hamas rule, so long as it reforms and is aided by Arab allies as part of a pathway to a future Palestinian state.
Unconfirmed Arab media reports on Monday claimed that Hamas had agreed to cede power in Gaza to the rival PA. Netanyahu was quick to reject the idea, repeating his assertion that “there will be neither Hamas nor the Palestinian Authority” in Gaza after the war ends.
The war in Gaza erupted with Hamas’s October 7 massacre, which saw some 3,000 terrorists burst across the border into Israel, killing some 1,200 people and seizing 251 hostages, 70 of whom remain in Gaza, including the bodies of at least 35 confirmed dead by the IDF.
Times of Israel staff contributed to this report.
