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SUBSCRIBER+ EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW – With talks on a ceasefire deal for the war in Gaza in what U.S. officials have called an “endgame,” phase and conflicting reports as to how close Israel and Hamas are to an agreement, The Cipher Brief spoke Friday with White House National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby about the state of what he called an “all-hands” effort to nail down a deal.
CIA Director Bill Burns and U.S. Middle East envoy Brett McGurk are representing the U.S. at talks in Cairo, along with negotiators from Israel, Egypt and Qatar. Kirby said at a National Security Council briefing earlier Friday that Hamas negotiators were not present.
“We’re in Cairo. They’re in Cairo. We need Hamas to participate,” Kirby said.
Multiple reports over the last 48 hours described the talks as near collapse, but they have continued. U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken visited the region earlier in the week and said that the so-called “Bridge Deal” to secure a cease-fire, along with the release of hostages held by Hamas and Palestinian prisoners held by Israel offered “the best, maybe the last, opportunity” for an agreement.
Blinken’s trip to the region this week was his ninth since the war began in October, just days after the Hamas terror of October 7. Israel and Hamas have agreed only once to a ceasefire-for-hostages deal – an arrangement that paused the war for one week last November.
Every other effort has failed, and the chief sticking points now involve the specific parameters of a ceasefire, and details as to the implementation of the detail.
Kirby spoke Friday with Cipher Brief International Correspondent Ia Meurmishvili.
Their conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
The Cipher Brief: How optimistic are you that a deal will occur? Where do the talks stand now?
Kirby: Secretary Blinken’s trip was consequential and important. It was a major muscle movement here in trying to move this process forward. What I can tell you today is that the teams are gathered in Cairo. Brett McGurk, our coordinator for the Middle East, was there last night, had some initial constructive conversations, not just with the Israelis, but with the Qataris and the Egyptians about the next steps.
Our CIA director, Bill Burns, is now in Cairo. And I suspect (the negotiations) will run into the weekend. But they have been constructive. Now, look, I don’t want to be Pollyannaish. We don’t have a deal right now. What needs to be done is both sides need to hammer out the details of implementation here – how the deal’s actually going to be put into effect and held into effect. And both sides have to be willing to meet their commitments in the framework of the deal that was already approved. So, again, starting out this weekend with constructive conversations, and we certainly hope that we can make some more progress over the course of the next couple of days.
The Cipher Brief: What’s the purpose for this dual track, with the Secretary of State and (CIA) Director Burns?
Kirby: Well, it’s more than a dual track. I mean, you’ve got the national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, involved, and of course, the president himself. The president had a constructive conversation with Prime Minister Netanyahu just a couple of days ago. And that followed a couple of conversations he had with the emir of Qatar and the president of Egypt. And I suspect you’re going to continue to see the president involved and engaged in the days ahead.
It’s an all-hands effort, as we used to say in the Navy. It’s not a dual track. This is what you’ve got to do when you’ve got such a significant national security interest at stake, not just for the United States, but for our friends in Israel and for the region writ large.
You want everybody on deck, everybody pulling on the lines and trying to get us there. And that’s exactly the approach that we’re taking.
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The Cipher Brief: Hamas has claimed that the terms of the proposal have changed at the last minute at Israel’s request. What’s different in the current proposal from the one that Hamas agreed to in May and July?
Kirby: I’ll tell you that the proposal that the president put forward at the end of May, the architecture of the deal, was basically agreed to by both sides. And we said at the time that the devil’s going to be in the details. And by the details we mean the implementation details, how you actually get this agreement into effect and keep it in effect. And that’s where we’re at right now.
In the process of talks back and forth since May, of course, both sides have amended text or suggested changes. That’s the way negotiations work. It stuns me a little bit that some folks are surprised that we still need talks and that there are still questions being asked and answers being tried to find. I mean, that’s how negotiations work. Both sides go back and forth until you finally get something worked out. And of course, nothing is agreed to until everything is agreed to, and not everything is agreed to right now. So that’s the way negotiations work.
I don’t want to be predictive here. I don’t want to tell you that we’re definitely going to come out of the weekend with something. We certainly hope so. That’s the energy that we’re putting towards it. But what really matters now is that both sides come together and agree to put this thing into effect and move it forward and agree to the basic implementation details.
I’d rather not go into what those details are. I think you can understand we’re at a very sensitive time and I don’t think it would be helpful to have all that stuff out in the public, but that’s what we’re focused on.
The Cipher Brief: I do have to ask you about some of the biggest disagreements between the sides. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu wants to make sure to guarantee Israel’s security by controlling access points and possibly even having a presence of the IDF inside the strip, which Hamas says is a red line for them. How do you see this major difference being resolved?
Kirby: The deal says, if you go back and look at the architecture, that Israel will agree to remove their force presence from populated areas and go to the east. That’s what it says and Israel has agreed to that stipulation. And so now what does that exactly look like? Well, that’s part of the discussions that we’re having here and hope to have in Cairo. Again, I don’t want to get into more detail in terms of what side is a proponent of which exact detail, but the framework itself that both sides agree to does have Israel, the IDF, withdrawing from populated centers and to the east. That central element has been agreed to. Now it’s really a matter of, what does it look like?
The Cipher Brief: That’s what they’re talking about – and you’re hopeful that it may be moving forward?
Kirby: Yes, we are hopeful. Again, I don’t want to sound too sanguine about this. This is difficult stuff, but it’s important stuff.
I think it’s important to take a step back and realize what this deal would do. It would stop the fighting, and potentially end the war, but stop the fighting at least for a period of six weeks, which of course brings down the violence incredibly. The death and the suffering, the injuries, the wounds that are being experienced by innocent Palestinians living in Gaza would stop.
It would also give us all a chance to get more humanitarian assistance in, flooding the zone with trucks to get more food, water, medicine, fuel, the kinds of things that Palestinians are so desperately in need of. And of course, not unimportantly, it gets hostages home. Not all of them. Not all of them, but the most at risk. The elderly and the sick, women. And that’s important too, for all those families that are anxiously waiting to be reunited with their loved ones. And there’s also, of course, political prisoners on the other side that Hamas wants back, that they would get back as well.
So there’s an awful lot of goodness here in this architecture, in this proposal, for everybody.
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The Cipher Brief: Secretary Blinken said that these talks might be the last chance. What does that mean in terms of negotiations?
Kirby: We have been approaching this with an incredible sense of urgency. It is at the top of the list of priorities that President Biden has right now. I can say that honestly, I know that’s a fact. He has been personally engaged in this and will stay personally engaged in this. We believe it’s time to end this war. And we believe that we are as close as we’ve ever been with this deal, to doing exactly that.
But it comes down to the details, and it comes down to both sides being willing to make the right commitments on those details to get it into effect. So I think what Secretary Blinken was rightly talking about was the important moment that we’re in. The critical moment that we’re in. And the very, very high sense of urgency with which we’re trying to meet that moment.
And we’ve got to capitalize on this incredibly important moment that we’re in right now.
The Cipher Brief: Iran threatened retaliation after the killings of Hamas and Hezbollah leaders (in July). We have not seen any retaliation. Some experts say that Iran most likely is waiting for the outcome of these negotiations. How do you see this situation and why do you think Iran has not retaliated?
Kirby: I can’t get in between the ears of (Iran’s) Supreme Leader. I wish I could, but I don’t know what he’s thinking on any given day. I’ll tell you, we’re monitoring this very, very closely. You’re right – we haven’t seen Iran attack Israel. But they certainly haven’t said that they’re not, either. And we got to take the rhetoric and the preparations that we know they have made very seriously. So we too have made preparations. We’ve added force capability to the region. A couple of aircraft carriers, aircraft squadrons, additional ballistic missile defense capabilities, both on the ground and at sea. We’ve got to be ready, in case Iran decides to move against Israel. We’ve got to defend Israel. But we also have to defend our troops and our facilities in the region. And we will. We are ready to do that.
We hope it doesn’t come to that and we’ve sent those messages to Iran, directly through vehicles that we have available to us, and some of our counterparts have also delivered those same messages to Iran. We’ll see what happens.
The Iranians have said that they want to see a cease-fire as well in Gaza. Well, that’s what we’re working on. And as I said earlier, and as Secretary Blinken has said, we’re close. We’re closer than we’ve been before. We want to finish that work.
The Cipher Brief: Many observers say that attacks by Hezbollah and Hamas are part of a policy of aggression of Iran towards Israel, which it calls a ring of fire. What is the administration doing to keep Iran accountable?
Kirby: Well, it is basically what I said before in terms of making sure we have an appropriate defensive posture in the region. We’re not looking for a fight with Iran. We’re not looking for a broader war and a conflict. Matter of fact, I’d go so far as to say that everything President Biden has done since the 7th of October has been designed not only to help Israel defend itself — and we’ve done that, including putting U.S. fighter aircraft in the skies to shoot down drones and missiles that were aimed, at them back in April by Iran — but also, diplomatically, to do everything we can to de-escalate the tensions. So that has been a key focus of ours.
That includes messaging to Iran, diplomatically. It includes messaging to Iran tangibly, in terms of the military forces that we’ve added to the region. Now, whether that changes the Supreme Leader’s calculus, I don’t know. We certainly hope that it will give him pause not to seek an escalation in the region.
On the broader issue of Iran, nobody can look at what this administration has done over the last three and a half years and say that we’re not holding Iran accountable for their destabilizing behaviors. More than 600 sanctions, 60 sanction packages on 600 entities and individuals to hold them accountable for everything from killing protesters, to maritime shipping attacks, to supporting Russia’s war in Ukraine.
And again, take a look at the force posture that we have in the Central Command, the Middle East region. It remains incredibly robust, one of the most robust force presence of American troops and defensive capabilities in the world. That sends a strong message, not only how important we take our interests there, but about how willing we are to continue to hold Iran accountable for all their activities.
We hope that all of those messages have the desired effect, which is no escalation, no all out war, no regional conflict. But if Iran chooses a different path, it would be imprudent and foolish if we weren’t ready to be able to defend ourselves and to defend our friends.
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