Support justice-driven, accurate and transparent news — make a quick donation to Truthout today!
The former top State Department spokesperson has admitted that the U.S. knew the Israeli government was systematically sabotaging ceasefire negotiations for months — even as he stood on the podium and spread the lie to the press and the public that it was Hamas standing in the way of a deal.
In a report by Israeli outlet Channel 13 published Thursday, former Biden administration official Matthew Miller said that Israel repeatedly and openly killed ceasefire deals when they were nearing a conclusion. In fact, he said, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu openly admitted to U.S. officials that he wanted to continue fighting in Gaza for “decades.”
As such, Israeli officials would make promises in private, but then make public statements to destroy an agreement, or would introduce new conditions at the last minute that they knew would be a non-starter, all with a goal to “try and sabotage” a deal, Miller said.
“There were times that we very much wanted to go public and make clear that we thought the prime minister was being completely intransigent and making it tougher to get a deal. But we discussed it amongst ourselves, and we made the decision that it wouldn’t accomplish anything,” said Miller.
He bizarrely claimed that there were a “number of cases” when Hamas backed out of negotiations when they thought there was division between the U.S. and Israel. “We wanted to speak very toughly to the government of Israel behind closed doors, but ultimately not do anything that we thought would make it harder to get to a deal,” Miller said.
This confirms numerous reports over the course of Israel’s genocide that this was always Israel’s goal — a longtime refrain of Hamas as well as many within the movement for Palestinian rights.
It also effectively means that the Biden administration was collaborating with Israel to sabotage the deals, even as U.S. officials touted Biden’s ceasefire proposal and their work on negotiations. Advocates for Palestinian rights have long said that it’s clear both the U.S. and Israel never wanted a deal — and that, actually, the U.S.’s support for Israel’s illegal annexation of Palestine stretches back decades.
The admission is stunning coming from Miller, who was a key face of the U.S.’s backing of the genocide.
For months, instead of criticizing Israel, U.S. officials blamed Hamas for the lack of a ceasefire deal. This included top figures like the president himself, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, and Miller, as he stood on the podium week after week to brief the press. They said this even as Hamas openly said they supported the deals.
“It has been Hamas, fundamentally, that has been unwilling to agree to a deal, really going back to August,” Miller said during one of his final press briefings in January, as he announced the temporary ceasefire agreement.
“They weren’t going to get the war that they were hoping to that led them to finally agree to reach an agreement here,” he said, perhaps ignoring that he had said that the U.S. “never wanted to see a diplomatic resolution with Hamas” just months before, in October.
Miller’s latest statements make it clear that the statements blaming Hamas were a lie. In April of 2024, for instance, Netanyahu announced that Israel would cross Biden’s supposed “red line” and invade Rafah, even as Biden was publicly calling for a ceasefire at the time.
“But in the middle of that proposal being submitted to Hamas, the prime minister publicly said that Israel was going to invade Rafah, whether there was a ceasefire or not,” Miller said. “You can imagine how much harder that made it to get a deal over the line.”
Then, he said that U.S. officials would even try to outmaneuver Israel when announcing Biden’s ceasefire outline in May — only for Netanyahu’s office to “leak” to the press that the plan was not what Israel had agreed to.
“We told the government of Israel only an hour or two before the speech because, frankly, we spent the last few months seeing the government of Israel, at times, try and sabotage an approach to get to a ceasefire, and we were determined not to let that happen here,” he said. “It is consistent with the pattern we saw for many months.”
Later in the program, Miller recalled statements from Netanyahu at a war cabinet meeting toward the beginning of the genocide, saying that he wanted to continue fighting in Gaza for decades.
Blinken told Netanyahu that Israel was “‘making it impossible to realize the dream that the state of Israel has had since its founding. You’re going to be bogged down here fighting this war for years and decades to come,’” Miller recounted. “And the prime minister said, ‘You’re right. We are going to be fighting this war for decades to come. That’s the way it’s been. That’s the way it’s going to be.’”
Miller acknowledged in June that it is “without a doubt true” that Israel was committing war crimes in Gaza during the Biden administration — even as he was telling the press that the U.S. disagreed with assessments saying so.
But he absolved himself of any guilt, claiming that he was simply doing his job. “When you’re at the podium, you’re not expressing your personal opinion. You’re expressing the conclusions of the United States government,” he said.
Media that fights fascism
Truthout is funded almost entirely by readers — that’s why we can speak truth to power and cut against the mainstream narrative. But independent journalists at Truthout face mounting political repression under Trump.
We rely on your support to survive McCarthyist censorship. Please make a tax-deductible one-time or monthly donation.