Brett McGurk's account of Biden Gaza policy has a huge blind spot

In April 2024, an Israeli drone struck a humanitarian convoy in Gaza, killing seven aid workers with World Central Kitchen, the food relief organization founded by celebrity chef Jose Andres.

A phone call between Biden and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyau days later was perhaps the closest Washington and Israel came to a rupture during the president’s term, according to Brett McGurk, the coordinator for the Middle East and North Africa in the Biden National Security Council.

At the time, intelligence indicated that Iran was preparing to launch drones and missiles at Israel in retaliation for the bombing of an Iranian consulate in Damascus on the same day as the WCK strike. “If not for the pending attack from Iran, we may have taken irreversible measures against Israel at this juncture,” McGurk writes in his recent book “Brink: Inside the Race to Free the October 7th Hostages,” calling Biden as frustrated and angry as he’d ever seen him. But the president did not go further.

Though McGurk — one of a small group of key foreign-policy decision makers in the Biden White House — says he “wrestled” with whether cracking down on Israel was the right course of action at that time, his conclusion not to was firm.

Biden ultimately said that U.S. policy will be “determined by our assessment of Israel’s immediate action on … specific, concrete measurable steps to address civilian harm,” and days later he deployed the U.S. military to help defend Israel against the Iranian attack. “If there was a better way to end the crisis, whether at this moment or another, Biden would have taken it,” McGurk writes.

Threatening to cut off assistance and even “increasing public pressure” would have been detrimental, he insists. “It seemed to encourage those fighting against it,” He added that Tehran attacked Israel in part because it saw Washington under pressure to break with Tel Aviv.

Nearly two years after Biden shuffled out of office, McGurk is hard at work trying to paint the administration’s Gaza policy as the best response to a hopelessly complex crisis. The World Central Kitchen episode is one of many instances in which McGurk argues that public disagreements between Washington and Israel only served to strengthen their adversaries, undermining efforts to secure a ceasefire and the release of hostages held by Hamas. As a result, McGurk suggests Washington had few, if any, viable alternatives to the approach Biden and his team pursued.

While “Brink” also chronicles the regional conflicts that arose following Israel’s onslaught on Gaza, including in Iran and on the Red Sea, its central focus is McGurk’s painstaking efforts to negotiate the release of the hostages taken by Hamas on October 7. Throughout the book, he portrays any perceived daylight between the U.S. and Israel as counterproductive to his diplomatic endeavors, and places the responsibility for the prolonged conflict overwhelmingly on Hamas. But former Biden administration officials who served alongside McGurk challenge that framing, arguing that his account disregards both the potential benefits of pressuring Israel and the costs of Washington's reluctance to do so.

As one former Biden administration official said, pressure on Israel actually helped secure concessions from Hamas by giving Arab governments greater political latitude to press the militant group themselves.

"When the United States demonstrated that it was also willing to exert pressure on the party over which it had the most influence, Israel, then the Arab countries were actually able to really turn the screws," the official told RS, pointing to Egypt and Turkey's key roles in the negotiations during the Biden-Trump transition, and later in the implementation of the framework signed in October 2025.

And even when American pressure failed to advance the hostage negotiations, it could achieve other objectives. Speaking about that tense April 2024 phone call in which, according to McGurk, Biden threatened to cut off military aid, Ilan Goldenberg offered a different assessment of its consequences. Where McGurk laments the potential dangers of confronting Israel, Goldenberg, who served as a Middle East adviser to Vice President Kamala Harris, says “that is only if you view this purely as a hostage negotiation and you forget all about the Palestinian humans.”

Following this intervention, Israel agreed to the temporary reopening of the Erez Crossing, and April 2024 saw the most truckloads of humanitarian supplies enter the strip of any month between October 2023 and January 2025, according to United Nations data. This represented a “fundamental change,” according to Goldenberg, one that did not last long because Washington failed to keep up the pressure.

The narrow focus on the hostage negotiations runs throughout “Brink.” McGurk devotes considerable attention to the hostages and their families, whereas the suffering of Palestinians, while acknowledged, receives far less attention, with the devastation in Gaza —where roughly 46,000 people were killed by the time Biden left office in 2025, according to health officials in the strip — largely treated as a backdrop to his diplomatic efforts.

Whether greater American pressure could have helped bring about an earlier ceasefire — one that would have freed the hostages — remains a contentious question.

Examining Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar's conduct throughout the war, there was little evidence his willingness to reach a deal was meaningfully influenced by disagreements between Washington and Israel, said the former official who spoke with RS.

“He was singularly focused on maximizing the pain on Israel,” the official said, so it simply “doesn’t add up” that he would be responsive to outside events.

Another member of the Biden administration, speaking on condition of anonymity, argued that even if public pressure risked emboldening Hamas, Washington's reluctance to confront Netanyahu carried risks of its own, giving the Israeli prime minister latitude on how to conduct negotiations even as he seemed to want the war to continue. McGurk’s perspective instead emphasizes the times when Hamas is an intransigent negotiating partner while glossing over times when Netanyahu impedes talks.

That issue becomes particularly relevant in the author’s treatment of the failed efforts to secure a ceasefire in the summer of 2024.

In late May 2024, McGurk says, Netanyahu accepted a phased ceasefire and hostage release framework that Biden had endorsed. Hamas took more than a month to respond, a delay McGurk highlights as evidence of the group's unwillingness to compromise. “Hamas did not care at all about the plight of Gazans; it only cared about its own survival,” he wrote.

Phil Gordon, who served as Harris's national security adviser, challenged McGurk's account earlier this month, arguing Hamas's eventual response in early July represented a significant concession: the group had dropped its demand that Israel commit to a permanent ceasefire before any hostages were released.

“That felt to us like a significant step forward. Nobody was naive in thinking that this wouldn't be difficult,” Gordon recently told the Jerusalem Post.

In “Brink,” McGurk describes Hamas’s response as containing “about two dozen substantive amendments to a carefully negotiated text,” many of which were “unworkable.” The ceasefire plan was further derailed, he adds, because “new issues had also arisen.”

These “new issues” refer to Netanyahu's sudden insistence on maintaining an Israeli military presence along the recently-seized Philadelphi Corridor, on Gaza’s border with Egypt, and introducing a screening mechanism for Palestinians returning to northern Gaza. Other administration officials say these demands came during a July 4 phone call with Biden, and despite the U.S. president’s push to persuade Netanyahu to move forward with the agreement. That phone call is not specifically mentioned in “Brink.”

“In the book, Brett says the situation on the ground changed and therefore the Israelis had new requirements,” Goldenberg told RS. “That's a very coded way of saying when Biden got on the phone and said to take the deal, Bibi said no.” One Israeli former hostage negotiator has said that July 2024 represented a missed chance to secure the hostages’ release, because he “didn’t think the Philadelphi Corridor was so important that it was right to miss the window of opportunity because of it.”

The new Israeli conditions proved to not be immovable. In the eventual agreement, struck in January 2025, the IDF agreed to withdraw from the corridor, though Israel has refused to follow through on that part of the agreement.

McGurk disputes the analysis that Israeli concessions were ultimately what made the agreement possible. In a book talk at the Atlantic Council this month, he called that suggestion “totally not true” and maintained that Hamas had finally accepted terms it had rejected the previous summer, driven in part by Israel’s military victories and the death of Sinwar.

McGurk occasionally acknowledges Netanyahu was an obstacle to peace, describing the prime minister during closing stages of hostage negotiations as “the flip side of Hamas,” because he would delay potential agreements, believing that prolonging the war would strengthen his negotiating position. But this doesn’t seem to affect his thinking on whether it made sense to pressure the Israeli prime minister.

The final chapters of “Brink,” however, suggest that a change in the U.S. approach also played a decisive role in the January 2025 hostage deal. Steve Witkoff, the incoming Trump administration's Middle East envoy, joins McGurk in the final negotiations. With a deal nearly complete, Witkoff aggressively presses Netanyahu to increase the number of Palestinian prisoners who would be released in exchange for nine sick or injured civilian hostages, in the first part of a larger deal.

At one point, McGurk recounts his replacement as telling the head of Mossad “tell your prime minister this is over (...) or I’ll go out right now and say the Israelis don’t give two shits about their hostages.” Ultimately, the Israeli prime minister relented.