Brett McGurk, one of the Biden administration’s most senior officials, was interviewed on Dan Senor’s podcast (full disclosure, etc.) and rebutted a long list of claims and myths regarding the hostage deal. It is very much worth listening to, especially given that he served in an administration that clashed with Israel to the point of imposing an arms embargo.

Brett McGurk’s five main points about the negotiations to free the hostages:

1. “They could have brought everyone home almost immediately” — McGurk: absolute bullshit

According to him, a comprehensive deal in the early stages would effectively have required surrendering to Hamas’s terms, and even then there was no reason to assume Hamas would release everyone. The U.S. assessment was that Hamas intended to hold some of the hostages for years as bargaining chips.

2. The first deal collapsed because of Hamas — and the dispute was over the young women

McGurk says Hamas tried to move on to releasing older men while it was still holding young women alive. From Israel’s perspective, agreeing to skip over them could have amounted to a death sentence for those women. Israel therefore insisted on completing that category, and Hamas stopped the releases.

3. Before the Rafah operation, there was no deal that Hamas was prepared to accept

According to McGurk, Israel agreed to several very difficult proposals, including the release of prisoners convicted of serious offenses, and Hamas rejected them. Hamas also did not accept the Israeli proposal that Biden publicly announced. McGurk stresses that there was no point before Rafah when a deal was truly within reach. Moreover, Hamas would have waited years before releasing everyone.

4. Biden’s pressure to stop before Rafah was not because Israel had torpedoed a deal

According to McGurk, by that stage Biden had simply reached the limits of his tolerance for the war and the regional crisis. The U.S. pushed for a reduction in fighting during Ramadan—a move that McGurk says actually reduced Hamas’s incentive to compromise in the negotiations.

5. Sinwar and military pressure were the key

McGurk says that as long as Yahya Sinwar was alive, he saw no realistic possibility of a deal. This includes the killing of the six hostages, an episode that was portrayed here as the government having sacrificed them. The Rafah operation was part of the sequence of events that ultimately led to Sinwar’s killing, and according to McGurk, military pressure was what brought Hamas to the points at which it agreed to deals. In his view, military pressure and a hostage deal were not alternatives—the pressure was the leverage that made the deals possible.