The following is the full transcript of an interview with Brett McGurk, the White House National Security Council coordinator for the Middle East and North Africa, on “Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan” that aired on Jan. 19, 2025.
MARGARET BRENNAN: We turn to Brett McGurk, White House National Security Council coordinator for the Middle East and North Africa. Good to have you here, Brett.
BRETT MCGURK: Thanks. Margaret, great to be here.
MARGARET BRENNAN: We’re watching the breaking news. This is a deal you negotiated. What can you tell us about how these three women who have been transferred to the Red Cross are doing? Well,
BRETT MCGURK: I just confirmed with my Israeli counterparts that they’re now in Israeli custody. So this has just happened. Look, I know they’re alive. I’m sure they are in- they’ve been held in deplorable conditions over 470 days, but the Israelis have a very good system to take them into their care, and they’re going to get the care they need and be reunited with their families.
MARGARET BRENNAN: It appeared that even up until this morning, it was in question whether Hamas was going to go through with this. The Israelis said they hadn’t handed over the names of the captives. Do we- why and do we know much about the well being of the three Americans that are still being held?
BRETT MCGURK: Well, look, this deal was negotiated over a year for good reason. It’s a detailed, complex arrangement to leave nothing to chance. And even up to last night, I was up until four o’clock in the morning, when this finally went into place to make sure that everything went according to the plan. Hamas owed the list of the three names, that had to happen for the cease fire to go into effect. That was delayed a couple hours. It eventually happened, and now we have the news today. You have a full ceasefire in effect in Gaza. You have about 800 trucks of aid getting into Gaza today.
MARGARET BRENNAN: 800?
BRETT MCGURK: 800 trucks of aid should reach Gaza today, and you’ve had the three girls now, again, reunited, hopefully with their families, and they’re now in Israeli custody.
MARGARET BRENNAN: So, the UN says an average of 72 trucks per day went in in December, and that’s been the case in January. Is there even the capacity for the Israelis to search these trucks and allow in that food. Do you expect 800 trucks to make it into Gaza today?
BRETT MCGURK: That’s why I’ve been in the Middle East for the last month, non-stop to make sure everything is ready to go. This was not put together in the last week. This has been put together, really since May, when President Biden laid out this framework. He developed this framework with the Emir of Qatar and with the president of Egypt, President Sisi, he announced it to the world in May. It was unanimously endorsed by the UN Security Council. We thought we were close in August, Margaret, and then we had six hostages killed in a tunnel underneath Rafah. I was just in your green room talking to the mother, or speaking with the mother of Hersch Goldberg-Polin, who was killed tragically in August. It was that incident in August when Hamas killed those hostages that we decided to flip the script. There was not a deal, because Hamas would not agree to release hostages. We supported the Israelis in going after Hezbollah. They took out Hezbollah in Lebanon. We have a cease fire in Lebanon. We have a new government in Lebanon. That isolated Hamas. Iran is in the weakest position it’s been in the Middle East in decades. So we went back to the table in December, Hamas, for the first time, for the first time, was ready to accept the May framework and begin to release hostages. It wasn’t until early January that they actually approved the hostage list, and that’s how we got to the result today.
MARGARET BRENNAN: But do we know Keith Siegel, Sagui Chen and Edan Alexander, how they’re doing?
BRETT MCGURK: Keith will come out in phase one. Sagui will come out in phase one. Edan was a uniformed Israeli soldier. He is phase two. But we are committed. I think you just heard this from Mike Waltz, and we’ve been working seamlessly with the incoming team. I think this is a testament to President Biden and to President Trump, allowing us to work together. I worked with Steve Witkoff over the last week, again, a partnership, I think, historic, to help get this done–
MARGARET BRENNAN: Trump’s envoy.
BRETT MCGURK: We are committed- We are committed to getting Edan out as early as possible. I spoke with Adi Alexander, Edan’s father, just last night.
MARGARET BRENNAN: So Prime Minister Netanyahu described this overnight as a temporary cease fire, and he says he has permission to begin fighting as needed. Do you believe he sees this as just a strategic pause, or that he actually wants to end this war?
BRETT MCGURK: The way the deal is structured, on day 16, the negotiations begin for phase two. Phase two will begin a negotiation for the exchange of soldiers to Palestinian prisoners. But also the conditions have to be set for phase two, and we support the Israelis in making sure those conditions are set so Hamas can never come back to power in Gaza. Hamas can never again threaten Israel from Gaza. Those conditions have to be set. We in the Biden administration, have been very clear. We want to see this- this deal reached all three phases. Every hostage come home. I think the Trump administration very much shares that objective and the template, the road map, again, that the President set out in May, this was the road map, ultimately, to ending the war, getting everybody home is the only way to do it. That road map is now in place. We have a cease fire today in Gaza, and we have a good chance to get every hostage home, and we got to do everything we can to make that happen.
MARGARET BRENNAN: Well, Hamas, according to Secretary Blinken, has recruited almost as many new militants as it has lost over the course of this war. Blinken said that this week.
BRETT MCGURK: Hamas has been significantly decimated. Its leader, Yahya Sinwar, was killed in October. Without that, we would not be at this deal. Hamas on October 7, was an organized military formation. It invaded Israel with 3500 troops in military formations, combat brigades. It is now no longer able to do that. It does not have military capacity–
MARGARET BRENNAN: But that argues that Israel has done something that may backfire on them in terms of the humanitarian situation that has allowed Hamas not to lose support, but to continue to recruit.
BRETT MCGURK: To get the– I- I work closely with my Israeli colleagues. I spent hours with Prime Minister Netanyahu. This is a deal that he fully supports. They agree. There’s a moral debt to these hostages. You have to get them out. And Israel is also going to make sure that it protects its national security. And we’re going to make sure we did that, you know, Margaret, we got this deal without that wider Middle East war that everybody was predicting. Americans did not get drawn into wider Middle East war. We defended Israel from Iranian missiles. We supported Israel going after Hezbollah. We supported Israel going after Hamas. We have defanged Iran’s proxy networks around the region, and that led to the isolation of Hamas. To actually get this deal today, that’s how we got to this point.
MARGARET BRENNAN: Okay, I have to take a break here. Brett, so don’t mean to cut you off, but we will have more questions, but we have to take a quick break. Stay with us.
PART 2:
MARGARET BRENNAN: Welcome back to Face the Nation. We’re continuing our conversation now with Brett McGurk of the National Security Council under President Biden. Brett, I just want to pick up where we left off. Just this past week, President Biden gave one of his last interviews, and he shared a private conversation with Prime Minister Netanyahu. Take a listen to it:
BIDEN SOT: I said, But Bibi, I said, you can’t be carpet bombing these communities. And he said to me, Well, you did it. You carpet bomb, not his exact words, but you carpet bombed Berlin. You drafted a nuclear weapon, you killed 1000s of innocent people because you had to in order to win a war.
MARGARET BRENNAN: President Biden went on to say, that’s why the entire UN and international order was created to stop that from ever happening again. How much do you think Israel’s standing in the world has been damaged by the conduct of its military?
BRETT MCGURK: Well Margaret, that was a conversation early on, when the debate was whether or not the Israelis should go in on the ground. And we had a debate with them about that. Ultimately, we supported them, and they were right, because Hamas was living in 400 miles of tunnels underneath Gaza. There was no way to root out Hamas without going into Gaza, and frankly–
MARGARET BRENNAN: But he was talking about dropping bombs on buildings.
BRETT MCGURK: You can see– but I’m just going back to what the conversation was about. It was about how this was going to go. And look, we’ve worked very closely with the Israelis. Too many people have died in this war. That’s why we work so hard to get to where we are today with a cease fire. The cease fire today, this framework, this road map the President laid out in May, was the only way to end the war, and the only way to end the war was, frankly, with massive pressure on Hamas and knocking out the other proxies that were supporting Hamas. I just have to emphasize this again, when Hezbollah was firing on Israel every single day, it was Hassan Nasrallah’s position that they would not stop shooting at Israel and making Northern Israel no man’s land until, until Israel accepted all of Hamas’ terms in Gaza. Israel had to knock out Hezbollah to get this deal. That’s what happened with the cease fire at the end of November. That’s what opened up the space to get this deal. It’s been a brutal war, but to end it, we had to get the cease fire deal. And to do that, to do that, we had to support Israel and back them up. And we did.
MARGARET BRENNAN: We will see if the ceasefire becomes an end to the war and there’s more diplomacy ahead. Brett McGurk, thank you for sharing the details.
