Biden aide McGurk says Washington had no warning of Oct. 7.

There is a particular kind of silence that follows a catastrophe—the moment when the machinery of government must confront not only what happened, but what it failed to see coming. For Brett McGurk, the former White House coordinator for the Middle East, that reckoning has arrived in the form of a book and the questions that come with it.

In an interview with The Jerusalem Post, McGurk revealed that Washington received no advance intelligence warning of Hamas's October 7 attack, and that a post-attack review found no indications that had been missed . "There was no warning, and the Israelis had no warning from what they told us," he said . He called for an Israeli investigation modeled on the U.S. 9/11 Commission, arguing that the scale of the failure demanded institutional scrutiny .

McGurk's account, drawn from his forthcoming book Brink: Inside the Race to Free the October 7th Hostages, offers a rare window into the White House's response. Just hours before the attack, he writes, the administration was working on a very different track—finalizing a normalization agreement between Saudi Arabia and Israel. The Saudi ambassador was in his office on October 6, and the hope was to announce a deal by the end of 2023 . By midnight, everything had changed. The Israeli ambassador told him Israel was at war .

The book also details the hostage negotiations that consumed the following months. McGurk worked with CIA Director William Burns and negotiators from Israel, Egypt, and Qatar. The first deal took effect on November 24, 2023, with an eight-day ceasefire and the release of hostages, including Abigail Edan, the young American-Israeli girl whose parents were killed on October 7 . But on the eighth day, Hamas refused to release younger women. Israel insisted it could not "skip over" them, potentially signing their death sentences. The war resumed .

McGurk speaks with particular pain about Hersh Goldberg-Polin, the dual Israeli-American citizen whose body was found in a Rafah tunnel in August 2024. "I felt like a complete failure," he said. "Whatever you can say in this process, we failed that family" . That moment led him to conclude that no deal was possible while Yahya Sinwar controlled the negotiations .

One of the book's most extraordinary revelations concerns October 11, 2023, when Israel believed Hezbollah was preparing to open a major northern front. Israeli officials were preparing to strike Hassan Nasrallah and his senior commanders. Ron Dermer called Jake Sullivan's office, saying Hezbollah had started an attack with paragliders. Washington urged restraint. Then a back-channel message arrived through a Norwegian intermediary from the Iranian Revolutionary Guard: Hezbollah would not launch a ground front if Israel did not strike first .

"I don't trust anything the Iranians tell me," McGurk said. But the message mattered. The moment passed. For McGurk, the book is a record of decisions made under pressure, of warnings that did not come, and of a White House that moved from normalization talks to regional crisis in a single night.

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Sources: The Jerusalem Post, Euronews