Brett McGurk, the former Biden administration Middle East coordinator, has strongly disputed claims that Israel caused a delay in securing a hostage deal due to its insistence on maintaining a military presence in key locations in the Gaza Strip. Instead, McGurk argues, it was Hamas that held up the agreement with its maximalist positions, until its position ultimately weakened. 

Speaking Thursday at an Atlantic Council event alongside Washington Post columnist David Ignatius about his new book, Brink: Inside the Race to Free the October 7th Hostages, McGurk took aim at recent narratives from some of his former Biden administration colleagues surrounding the agreement.

While McGurk did not name his former colleague explicitly, his remarks directly referenced a social media post last weekend by Phil Gordon, the former national security advisor to then-Vice President Kamala Harris. Gordon had suggested that a deal had finally been achieved in January 2025 because Israel had dropped its insistence on maintaining a military presence in the Philadelphi Corridor and conducting weapons checks in the Netzarim Corridor — implying a deal could have been struck months earlier had Jerusalem compromised sooner.

“I actually, David, had a former colleague who was not in the negotiations recently say the way they got the deal was that Israel dropped demands on [the] Philadelphi Corridor and these other things. Totally not true,” McGurk said. “Hamas accepted things they were not prepared to accept in the summer,” such as ceding post-war Gaza governance, allowing a partial IDF military presence and dropping its demand for an upfront, permanent ceasefire.

Under the January agreement, Israeli forces remained in the Philadelphi Corridor for the entirety of Phase One, which provided for the release of 33 hostages. The agreement also included provisions for weapons checks on vehicles moving north through the Netzarim Corridor. McGurk argued that those terms were more favorable to Israel than what had been on the table the previous summer.

McGurk used as an example of Hamas’ intransigence a moment from his book which describes Hamas’ out-of-the-blue demand for 110 life-sentence Palestinian prisoners in exchange for nine ill and wounded civilians as, demonstrating how the terrorist group delayed the negotiation process even in times when Israel had agreed to the terms of a deal and was facing American pressure.