BRINK: Inside the Race to Free the October 7th Hostages, by Brett McGurk
In the terrible logic of political abductions, hostages have a price but no inherent value. On the one hand, their kidnappers assume they can be exchanged for whatever it is they want — money, prisoners, political concessions. On the other, they barely exist as human beings. They are reduced to the status of tradable commodities in an extremely specialized market.
Aside from its innate obscenity, Hamas’s assault on Israeli communities on Oct. 7, 2023, was a misunderstanding of this market. In “Brink: Inside the Race to Free the October 7th Hostages,” Brett McGurk, who led the U.S. government’s efforts to free the 251 people captured by Hamas that day, describes this action as “among the worst mass hostage events in history.” Worst, from the callous point of view of the perpetrators, meant best — this was imagined as a richly abundant catch.
The mastermind of the attacks, Yahya Sinwar, had himself been released from an Israeli prison in 2011 as part of a hostage deal in which Israel traded more than a thousand Palestinian prisoners for a single Israeli soldier, Gilad Shalit. It is easy to see how Sinwar might have concluded that the human haul of Oct. 7 — ranging from a 9-month-old baby to an 85-year-old woman — would give Hamas both power to make large political demands and protection from Israeli revenge. The cost of this error for the people Hamas purports to represent remains incalculable.
McGurk is one of the most experienced figures in American diplomacy in the Middle East, having served in different roles under George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Donald Trump and Joe Biden. At the time of the Oct. 7 attacks, he was the White House’s lead foreign policy adviser for the entire region extending from Morocco to Iran. “Brink” is his account — largely in the form of a reconstructed diary — of his involvement in proxy negotiations (conducted through Egypt and Qatar) with Hamas for the release of the hostages, 12 of whom were American citizens.
The word “race” in the book’s subtitle is a strange misnomer — it took two years for the last of the living hostages to be freed and it was not until January 2026 that the final body was returned. McGurk’s story is mainly one of frustration, exhaustion, disappointment and despair. Indeed, “Brink” works best as a reminder that high-stakes diplomacy is all grind and no glamour, conducted by people who wrestle with the pain of being dragged away at all hours from their own children and who suffer the almost unbearable stress of knowing that dozens of lives depend on their skills and judgments.
But the sense of urgency the publishers would like to generate is precisely what was absent on both sides. Hamas played cruel games with the mediators, raising and dashing hopes in line with its own (still obscure) internal calculations. Meanwhile, in a meeting with Biden shortly after the attacks, the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, “offered no ideas on how we might secure their release, other than as a byproduct of the Israeli ground assault into Gaza,” McGurk writes.
Of another meeting with Netanyahu, in February 2024, McGurk records that “for more than 30 minutes, he never mentioned the hostages,” and “Netanyahu was animated in discussing the military campaign, and far less so when discussing the hostages — when he chose to discuss them at all.”
Although McGurk does not intend it as such, “Brink” becomes a grim case study of learned helplessness. The United States had effectively given up on the Palestinian question before Oct. 7: As McGurk acknowledges, “The Middle East was a sideshow, and I had tried to keep it away from Biden’s crowded inbox.”
This culpable negligence extended to Netanyahu’s active collusion with Hamas. “Shortly after Biden’s inauguration, I was briefed that Israel had an ongoing policy to pump millions of dollars per month into Gaza for the benefit of Hamas and its civilian-led ministries,” McGurk writes. “The Trump administration had endorsed the policy, issuing waivers to ensure Qatar would not be punished or sanctioned for channeling funds to a terrorist group.” The most McGurk has to offer by way of criticism of this catastrophic policy is that, “looking back, Washington should have asked harder questions about this approach.”
When this complacency exploded in atrocity, America’s self-imposed helplessness did not evaporate — it deepened. McGurk, at one point, refers to “a sense of tortured indecision” in the Biden administration’s approach to the unfolding calamity. As he is leaving office, Biden relays an adage to McGurk: “Presidents don’t deal the cards. They’re dealt for you.” In the face of the mass killings of civilians in Gaza that McGurk rightly calls “a sickening horror in every dimension,” this moral evasiveness is dizzying.
A little over a week after the Hamas attacks, Biden embraced Netanyahu in Tel Aviv. McGurk reveals that he himself thought Biden’s suggestion that he fly to Israel while the overall situation was still unclear so “preposterous” that he “thought Biden might be joking.”
McGurk interprets Biden’s determination to go as being motivated by his belief that he could “slow Bibi down” and prevent him from launching a wider regional war. However decent this motivation may have been, the embrace seemed to signal that Biden was effectively signing a blank check for the war on Gaza.
McGurk thus had no real leverage over Netanyahu in the hostage negotiations or the conduct of the war: “I remained hopeful that we might somehow convince Israel not to mount a ground attack, not because Israel lacked the legitimacy to destroy Hamas as a military organization, but because we still lacked a conceivable program for reducing civilian harm in the path of the advance.”
This reads as though the United States was merely a benign outsider, hoping for the best but powerless to prevent the worst. “Biden,” as McGurk concedes, “could not credibly explain how the war might end.” With no American vision of a decent solution, there is still no sense of an ending, just a pulverized population and an Israel whose international standing lies in the dust.
Biden’s own team was deeply divided. By the beginning of April 2024, according to McGurk, “Some advised him to simply tell Netanyahu the war was over. If Netanyahu refused, we’d cut Israel’s support.”
McGurk himself was opposed to this strategy, believing that it would merely embolden Hamas and Iran, and Biden vacillated. The chaos of the president’s abortive re-election campaign and his replacement by Vice President Kamala Harris at the top of the Democratic ticket added to the uncertainty. After Trump defeated Harris in November, the national security adviser Jake Sullivan told McGurk that he “suspected that Netanyahu planned to wait us out, preferring to do the deal with Trump.”
While the carnage continued, McGurk did nonetheless manage to facilitate a deal in which over 100 hostages were freed in November 2023 and — working with Trump’s envoy Steve Witkoff — to secure the release of 33 more by February 2025.
He rightly takes pride in his contribution to the joyful return of a majority of the hostages to their families. Each life saved is a light in the unspeakable darkness. But if more and more innocent lives are not to be lost, there needs to be a much larger reckoning with America’s failures in the Middle East than McGurk feels able to provide.
BRINK: Inside the Race to Free the October 7th Hostages | By Brett McGurk | Crown | 229 pp. | $31
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