What Went Wrong in the Effort to Free the Oct. 7 Hostages?

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. Brink Save to your reading list : Want to read Have read 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. We are having trouble retrieving the article content. Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings. Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times. Thank you for your patience while we verify access. Already a subscriber? Log in . Want all of The Times? Subscribe .