Israel's hostage negotiation team holds debriefing reviewing two years of activity

The negotiation team for the release of hostages held an initial debriefing meeting today, intended to summarize its main activities over the past two years and the three hostage-release agreements reached during this period, Kan News reported this Monday evening. Similar debriefing meetings may be held in the future.

During the war, three hostage-release deals were executed – in November 2023, January 2024, and October 2025. Over this period, several team members and officials were replaced.

Meanwhile, the IDF intends to investigate additional core issues in the near future, including operations carried out in Gaza during the war, such as the capture of Rafah and Khan Yunis.

On Saturday night, Eyal Tzir Cohen – a former senior Mossad official who also served as head of the negotiation team to Qatar from the start of the war until U.S. President Donald Trump took office – told Kan News that Israel had not been close to reaching a deal at any point during the previous year, until the change in the U.S. administration in early 2025.

“There were ups and downs, there was a sense of progress and what you might call ‘one step forward, two steps back.’ We were not, as some media reports suggested, ‘on the verge’ of a deal. We simply were not close,” he explained.

“The Biden administration accompanied the negotiations very intensively during 2024, from the moment the first round collapsed,” he said.

According to him, “What was lacking was the factual basis needed to properly assess and understand the extent to which the involvement of the Biden administration – and the officials it sent on its behalf, Blinken and Jake Sullivan – ultimately contributed in a way that was not constructive to the negotiations.”