McGurk's 'Brink' says Hamas, not Israel, stalled the 2025 hostage deal, disputing ex-Harris adviser Phil Gordon

Brett McGurk spent the Biden years running Middle East policy at the White House. Now he is out with a book, "Brink: Inside the Race to Free the October 7th Hostages," and a round of interviews, and he is picking a fight with a former colleague.

The subject is simple: why did it take until January 2025 to get a hostage deal out of Gaza?

The dispute over the January 2025 deal

At an Atlantic Council event with Washington Post columnist David Ignatius, McGurk took aim at a social media post by Phil Gordon, who was national security adviser to then-Vice President Kamala Harris. Gordon suggested the deal finally got done because Israel dropped its demand for a military presence in the Philadelphi Corridor and for weapons checks in the Netzarim Corridor. The implication was that a deal could have come months earlier if Jerusalem had compromised sooner.

McGurk did not name Gordon, but his remarks were aimed squarely at that post. "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."

The terms of the January agreement are on the record. Israeli forces stayed in the Philadelphi Corridor for all of Phase One, which provided for the release of 33 hostages. The deal also included weapons checks on vehicles moving north through the Netzarim Corridor. McGurk argues those terms were more favorable to Israel than what was on the table the previous summer.

His example of Hamas stalling is in the book. At a point when Israel had agreed to terms and was under American pressure, Hamas suddenly demanded the release of 110 Palestinian prisoners serving life sentences in exchange for nine ill and wounded civilians.

Six hostages and the Sinwar problem

In an interview with The Sunday Times, McGurk described the talks as "the most complex and horrific crisis I've ever dealt with."

He said a deal looked close in August 2024. The package would have combined a ceasefire, the release of hostages and Palestinian prisoners, and easing of movement restrictions in Gaza. It collapsed after Israeli forces recovered the bodies of six hostages killed by Hamas in a tunnel beneath Rafah: Alex Lobanov, Almog Sarusi, Carmel Gat, Ori Danino, Hersh Goldberg-Polin and Eden Yerushalmi.

McGurk says he learned of the deaths from then-CIA Director William Burns. He then told President Joe Biden that meaningful progress was unlikely while Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar was alive. "We knew we're not gonna get a hostage deal until Yahya Sinwar is dead," he said.

He also said Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu pursued two goals through the war: freeing the hostages and keeping Hamas from retaining control of Gaza. McGurk described those aims as competing. Netanyahu's stated position, as McGurk's own telling frames it, is that the second goal was never optional, since Hamas in power is what produced October 7.

McGurk credits cooperation between the outgoing Biden team and the incoming Trump team for the eventual agreement.

Before October 7

In his PBS NewsHour interview on Oct. 9 with Nick Schifrin, McGurk also covered what came before the attack. The U.S., Israel and Saudi Arabia, he said, were on the brink of a historic normalization agreement before Oct. 7. The talk also covered the rush to free the hostages and the U.S. response to the war.

The three-year anniversary has prompted other readings of the war's origins. A Daily Wire opinion column argues that Hamas's 1988 charter is the best guide to what happened. It quotes the charter's declaration that "There is no solution for the Palestinian question except through Jihad." The charter's text is public. Whether it explains Hamas's bargaining behavior in 2024 is the column's argument, not something McGurk's account addresses.

What remains open

The core disagreement is a factual one between two people who worked for the same administration. Gordon's account holds that Israeli flexibility on the corridors was the key to the deal. McGurk's account holds that Israel's terms in January were tougher than in the summer, and that Hamas simply was not ready to accept them until its position weakened.

McGurk also says Gordon was not in the negotiations. Gordon's side of that charge is not in the public record McGurk is responding to beyond the original post. Both versions cannot be fully right. The timeline of those 2024 proposals, including exactly which Israeli demands on the corridors changed and when, is the detail that will settle it.