Inside the Hostage Negotiations - with Brett McGurk

What really happened inside the negotiations to free the October 7th hostages?

For 15 months, the Biden administration, Israel, Qatar, Egypt, and Hamas negotiated over one impossible question: how do you bring the hostages home while also fighting a war? Brett McGurk, who was at the center of those talks, joins Dan Senor to take listeners inside the negotiating rooms—from the first backchannel with Qatar to the deals that repeatedly came within reach and fell apart. He explains what he believes Washington got wrong, why public pressure sometimes made negotiations harder, and how an unlikely Biden-Trump transition partnership helped finally get a deal over the line.

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In this episode:

• What Washington knew in the first hours after October 7th

• How Qatar became the critical channel to Hamas

• Why the first hostage deal nearly collapsed over the younger women

• The impossible tradeoff between freeing hostages and maintaining military pressure

• Did public U.S. pressure on Israel make a hostage deal harder to reach?

• Why the deaths of six hostages changed McGurk’s view of the negotiations

• How the Biden and Trump teams worked together to close the final deal

• What the hostage crisis revealed about divisions inside Israeli society

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Credits: Ilan Benatar, Devan Schwartz, Brittany Cohen, Mindy Schaper, Ava Weiner, Martin Huergo, Mariangeles Burgos, and Yuval Semo