McGurk's Memoir Says Pressure on Israel Backfired; Former Biden Officials Say the Record Shows Otherwise

On April 1, 2024, an Israeli drone struck a clearly marked World Central Kitchen convoy in Gaza, killing seven aid workers. Days later, President Biden called Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in what Brett McGurk, then the Biden National Security Council's Middle East coordinator, describes as perhaps the closest Washington and Israel came to a rupture during Biden's presidency.

McGurk lays out that moment in his new book, Brink: Inside the Race to Free the October 7th Hostages. According to his account, intelligence at the time showed Iran preparing to launch drones and missiles at Israel in retaliation for an Israeli strike on an Iranian consulate in Damascus, which had happened the same day as the WCK killings.

"If not for the pending attack from Iran, we may have taken irreversible measures against Israel at this juncture," McGurk writes, describing Biden as angrier than he had seen him at almost any other point in the war.

Biden did not take those measures. Instead, McGurk writes, the president said U.S. policy would be "determined by our assessment of Israel's immediate action on ... specific, concrete measurable steps to address civilian harm," and within days deployed the American military to help shoot down the Iranian barrage aimed at Israel. McGurk calls this the right call, arguing that public confrontation with Israel only emboldened Hamas and Iran, and that Tehran launched its attack in part because it saw Washington's relationship with Israel under strain.

That is McGurk's framing. Former colleagues dispute it.

One former Biden administration official, speaking to Responsible Statecraft on condition of anonymity, said pressure on Israel gave Arab governments more room to lean on Hamas directly. "When the United States demonstrated that it was also willing to exert pressure on the party over which it had the most influence, Israel, then the Arab countries were actually able to really turn the screws," the official said, citing Egypt and Turkey's roles in later negotiations.

Ilan Goldenberg, who served as a Middle East adviser to Vice President Kamala Harris, pushed back on McGurk's reading of the April 2024 call itself. According to Goldenberg, Biden's intervention was followed by the temporary reopening of the Erez Crossing, and April 2024 saw the highest monthly volume of humanitarian truckloads into Gaza of the entire war, by United Nations figures. Goldenberg called the opening a "fundamental change" that did not last because Washington failed to sustain the pressure that produced it.

Goldenberg's sharpest line is aimed at McGurk's entire frame. Where McGurk weighs the dangers of confronting Israel against the risk to hostage talks, Goldenberg said that calculus "is only if you view this purely as a hostage negotiation and you forget all about the Palestinian humans."

The dispute is not about whether the WCK strike happened, or whether Iran attacked Israel that month. Those are documented. It is about what Washington's one real threat to Israel actually bought, and whether McGurk's book, now shaping how the Biden administration's Gaza policy will be remembered, leaves that part out.