A woman holds a picture of dead hostage Ran Gvili, as Israelis attend a rally calling for the immediate return of the remains of all hostages held in Gaza, at the Hostages Square in Tel Aviv, Israel, Nov. 29, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Nir Elias

Three years ago this week, in less than 24 hours, Hamas murdered some 1,200 people in southern Israel and took over 250 hostages into Gaza. Within two weeks, before Israel had sent a single ground unit into the Strip, the charge of “genocide” was already circulating, aimed at the victims rather than the cold-blooded killers.

Brett McGurk has now put on the record what he saw from the other side of the table. As President Biden’s Middle East coordinator, McGurk was the lead American negotiator in every round of hostage talks from October 2023 through January 2025. His new book, Brink, just came out, and he has walked through its account on “Face the Nation” and Dan Senor’s “Call Me Back” podcast.

McGurk served a president who paused shipments of bombs to Israel, and nobody will mistake him for a Netanyahu loyalist. That is why his account matters. It answers the question three years of “ceasefire now” marches never asked: Who kept this war going?

McGurk’s starting point is that Hamas understood what hostages on this scale would buy it. Holding some 250 hostages, most of them civilians, would let a terrorist militia sit at the table as if it were a government. The hostages were the core of its strategy from the first hour.

In the early weeks, Hamas would not even admit it was holding hostages. When talks began, it offered to guarantee the release of only 20, claiming it could not locate the rest without a ceasefire first. Israel knew Hamas held nearly 70 women and children, and freed hostages have since confirmed that Hamas kept careful records of every captive. The claim was a Hamas lie meant to buy a ceasefire on the cheap.

The November 2023 deal brought an eight-day pause and the release of about 100 hostages. According to McGurk, the pause would have continued had Hamas released a group of young women who were part of the deal. Hamas refused. McGurk names Carmel Gat and Eden Yerushalmi among those who should have come home then. Neither ever did.

By the summer of 2024, Hamas was taking five weeks to respond to a single proposal. When it finally answered, it told the world it had accepted the deal. McGurk says that was false, and that the response was loaded with clear poison pills. In round after round in Cairo and Doha, Hamas never agreed to a list of hostages it would release. On Aug. 16, the United States tabled an offer that McGurk estimates went about 80% of the way toward Hamas’s demands, publicly backed by Qatar’s emir and Egypt’s president.

Hamas still hadn’t responded on Aug. 31, when McGurk learned that Israeli troops had found six hostages murdered in a tunnel under Rafah. Hersh Goldberg-Polin, 23, Carmel Gat, 40, and Eden Yerushalmi, 24, were on the list he had been carrying for the deal. Almog Sarusi, 27, Alex Lobanov, 32, and Ori Danino, 25, were murdered alongside them.

In December 2024, with a complete deal in hand, Hamas announced it would release only 12 hostages alive. It then raised its price, demanding 300 Palestinian prisoners serving life sentences, many of them cold-blooded murderers of Israelis and Americans, in exchange for nine sick and wounded captives.

Compare that record with the accusation leveled at Israel since October 2023. Genocide requires intent to destroy a people as such, and in every genocide on record the perpetrators controlled when the killing ended. The Jews could not stop Babi Yar or Treblinka by producing a list of names, and the Tutsis could not end the massacres in Rwanda by laying down their arms.

In Gaza, the reverse was true. McGurk says plainly that the war would not have ended without the hostages coming home. From Oct. 8, 2023, Hamas could have stopped the fighting by returning the captives and surrendering. Instead, it bargained over the living and the dead for more than two years, until the last surviving hostages were released in October 2025.

McGurk also acknowledges the bitter irony: Western pressure on Israel prolonged the very war it was supposed to end. Every public American demand aimed at Jerusalem signaled to Yahya Sinwar that time was on his side, encouraging Hamas to hold out rather than release the hostages. Protesters marched on Israeli embassies, not Qatar’s, though Qatar had direct access to Hamas’s leaders. And campus encampments demanded concessions from Israel rather than the one thing that could have ended the war: Hamas releasing the hostages.

None of this mattered to those pushing the genocide-libel because the charge never grew out of evidence from the war. It came first, before the war had started, and the evidence was gathered to fit it afterward.

That sequence has a long history here. In 1929, Haj Amin al-Husseini’s circle spread the false claim that Jews were plotting against al-Aqsa, and within days rioters in Hebron murdered 67 Jews. Hebron’s Jews had no state, no army, and no “occupation” anyone could point to. Ninety-four years later, Hamas called its massacre the “Al-Aqsa Flood.”

Three years after Oct. 7, the most detailed account of the hostage talks comes from a senior Biden official, not an Israeli spokesman. It shows Hamas dragging babies, grandmothers, and young festivalgoers into tunnels and pricing them like inventory, haggling over who would come home alive and who in a coffin, and murdering captives rather than freeing them.

It also shows a war Hamas could have ended at any time and chose to prolong, fought in civilian attire from homes, schools, and hospitals, while senior Hamas official Mousa Abu Marzouk declared that its tunnels were only built for its “fighters” and that protecting Gaza’s civilians was the job of the UN and Israel.

Hamas kept this macabre ledger in Jewish blood. For three years, its excusers and defenders have tried to hand the bill to the Jews.

Micha Danzig is an attorney, former IDF soldier, and former NYPD officer. He writes widely on Israel, Zionism, antisemitism, and Jewish history. He serves on the board of Herut North America.