Meet Adam Boehler, Trump’s complacent, confused and dangerously naive hostage envoy
Hamas leaders must be laughing in disbelief after their interactions with a man who says he tries to identify their ‘human elements’; nobody’s laughing in Israel, least of all the families of the hostages
Meet Adam Boehler, US President Donald Trump’s envoy for hostages.
Hamas already has, in one or more recent negotiating sessions (Boehler won’t say how many).
And on Sunday, Israelis got to see him at length too, in a veritable flood of television interviews — at least two to American networks, and at least four to Israeli outlets.
There may have been more. It got hard to keep up. It was harder still to make sense of what he was saying.
1. He calls Palestinian security prisoners “hostages”
Boehler, who also worked for Trump in the first administration, sometimes refers to Palestinian security prisoners, who include mass-murdering terrorists, as hostages. “They are exchanging massive amounts of hostages for one person,” he said, for example, in one of his Israeli interviews, with Channel 13.
2. He calls Israeli hostages “prisoners”
Boehler also sometimes refers to the (mostly civilian) Israeli hostages — who were abducted by Hamas and other terrorist groups during the Hamas-led massacre in southern Israel on October 7, 2023, and whose release he has been charged with helping to expedite — as prisoners. “I think there is a deal where they can get all of the prisoners out, not just the Americans,” he told CNN for instance. The purpose of his direct talks with Hamas, he told Israel’s Channel 12 a few hours later, “was to lead and to really enter into broader talks on all of the prisoners because the President made very clear that we’re focused on not just Americans here, American-Israelis, but Israelis overall…”
Many of us make little errors of language when we speak, but those two words “hostages” and “prisoners” are among the basic building blocks of his actual job. You’d think he’d know and take care to keep track of the difference between the two.
Not incidentally, Boehler on Sunday also twice misnamed the only living hostage with American citizenship, Edan Alexander, referring to him as “Adi.” (That’s Edan’s father’s name.)
3. He tries to ‘identify with the human elements’ of the Hamas leaders he meets
Boehler told CNN that his strategy in negotiating with the Hamas representatives — the leaders, that is, of an organization avowedly committed to destroying Israel, who massacred 1,200 people in southern Israel, burning people in their homes, raping and brutalizing, and have vowed to do so again if given the chance — is “to identify with the human elements of those people and then build from there.”
Asked by interviewer Jake Tapper what it was like for him, as a Jewish American, to sit down with “antisemitic murderers,” he allowed that when “you know what they’ve done, it’s hard not to think of it.” But the “most productive” approach, he went on, “is to realize that every piece of a person is a human.”
4. He says Trump personally approved his talks… or not
Boehler gave two very different definitive answers to the perfectly simple question of whether Trump personally approved his direct talks with Hamas.
Tapper asked him: “So you did get sign-off from President Trump ahead of time, though?” Boehler nodded three times and answered: “Of course.”
Channel 12’s Yonit Levy asked him, in similar vein, whether Trump “personally signed off” on his direct talks with Hamas. This time Boehler replied, “The White House did. So that’s a group of folks. But people in the White House did know about me having those discussions, yes.”
5. He publicly criticizes Israel’s hostage deal terms to date as untenably generous to Hamas
Rather than presenting a united front between allies against the terrorists who are still holding Israeli (and dual American) hostages, Boehler publicly criticized the Israeli government’s handling of the crisis thus far, which saw Israel free some 2,000 Palestinian inmates in return for the release of 33 Israelis. “We wouldn’t do that deal in the United States,” he told Channel 13.
6. And he publicly differentiates between American and Israeli interests
Making more music for Hamas’s ears, he took pains, in the CNN interview, to specifically distinguish between America’s interests in the negotiations and Israel’s: “We’re the United States. We’re not an agent of Israel. We have specific interests at play.”
7. He expresses scathing indifference to Israel’s concerns about his negotiating with Hamas
Boehler blithely declared that he wasn’t too bothered if Israel’s Minister of Strategic Affairs Ron Dermer, who is Benjamin Netanyahu’s closest confidant and a kind of counterpart to Boehler as the prime minister’s hostage talks coordinator, was furious about his face-to-face interaction with the mass-murdering terror chiefs.
“I don’t really care about that that much — no offense to Dermer,” Boehler said on Channel 13. “If it was a big deal every time Dermer got a little bit upset… Ron might have a lot of big deals every day.”
“I love Ron,” he professed. “We’ll work together again. It was great. I take no offense because he was doing what he was supposed to do.”
8. He uses ‘nice guys’ and ‘Hamas’ in the same convoluted sentences
Boehler twice used the phrase “nice guys” when discussing Hamas in such convoluted formulations during his CNN interview as to subsequently recognize the need to issue a clarification because his remarks were being misinterpreted.
The first reference was when he was again discussing Dermer being upset: “I spoke with Ron, and I’m sympathetic. He has someone that he doesn’t know well, making direct contact with Hamas. Maybe I would see them and say, ‘Look, they don’t have horns growing out of their head. They’re actually guys like us. They’re pretty nice guys.’”
The second reference was when he was asserting that Israel knows that his contacts with Hamas were ultimately going to prove beneficial to Israel: “Israel knows walking out of that, that it’s not like Hamas got the world because I thought they were a bunch of nice guys.”
Hours later, he realized that those comments were, shock, being misunderstood, and issued a clarification, with Trumpian resort to CAPITAL LETTERS.
“I want to be CRYSTAL CLEAR as some have misinterpreted,” he wrote. “Hamas is a terrorist organization that has murdered thousands of innocent people. They are BY DEFINITION BAD people. And as @POTUS has said, not a single Hamas member will be safe if Hamas doesn’t RELEASE ALL HOSTAGES IMMEDIATELY.”
9. He self-evidently didn’t insist that Hamas immediately release all the hostages
Except that, as he made clear in his interviews, he has not been demanding of Hamas that it “RELEASE ALL HOSTAGES IMMEDIATELY.” But rather, as he told CNN, he had been trying to “jumpstart some negotiations that were in a very fragile place” and had “wanted to say to Hamas, What is the endgame that you want here? Not the dream endgame, but what do you think is realistic at this point.”
10. He thinks Hamas will ultimately choose to melt away
Boehler displayed a dangerous naivete as regards Hamas’s ultimate intentions, for all the world as though October 7 had not happened, and as though Hamas, in order to try to ensure its survival, was not cynically utilizing every ounce of leverage it has attained by holding (and torturing and sometimes killing) the hostages he is charged with helping to extricate.
Hamas has told the world that it will repeat October 7 as often as it can until Israel is destroyed. “Israel is a country that has no place on our land,” Ghazi Hamad, a member of Hamas’s political bureau, told Lebanese television barely two weeks after the massacre, and clarified that, yes, he meant it needs to be annihilated. “The Al-Aqsa Deluge [as Hamas called its October 7 slaughter] is just the first time, and there will be a second, a third, a fourth… Nobody should blame us for the things we do. On October 7, October 10, October one-millionth, everything we do is justified.”
But Boehler knows better. On Channel 12, he solemnly asserted his conviction that the declaredly genocidal monsters will ultimately prove willing to give up their guns and take no role in the political leadership of Gaza — that Hamas, in short, will choose to melt away, to become not Hamas. Asked by Levy whether he “realistically” thinks “that Hamas would eventually agree to lay down its weapons and not be part of Gaza’s political future,” he answered without hesitation: “I do believe that.”
**
It is not clear why Boehler would have reconsidered his initial answer to the question of whether it was Trump who personally approved his direct interactions with Hamas, since the president has himself publicly confirmed and defended the outreach: “We are helping Israel in [holding] those discussions because we’re talking about Israeli hostages,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office on Thursday. “We’re not doing anything in terms of Hamas. We’re not giving cash… You have to negotiate. There’s a difference between negotiating and paying. We want to get these people out.”
It could just be that Boehler is beginning to realize that he has mishandled his mandate. As former Trump ambassador to Israel David Friedman tweeted late Sunday, “This past week, President Trump brilliantly presented Hamas with a binary choice: release all the hostages and surrender, or be destroyed. It is the only path to ending the war.” But Boehler, Friedman went on, apparently “took the unprecedented step to meet with Hamas to consider a third way — whether a deal could be struck where Hamas ‘would not be involved’ in governing Gaza. A deal with Hamas is a waste of time and will never be kept. Attempting one is beneath the dignity of the United States. Adam, I know you mean well but listen to your boss. The choice must remain binary.”
Then again, given the complacency exhibited by Boehler in his interviews, he is unlikely to be questioning his own performance. Indeed, he smilingly indicated in several of the interviews that he might “drop by” on Hamas again.
Doubtless Hamas, which must be laughing in disbelief at the emissary Trump sent their way — so contrasting a figure, it should be noted, to the empathetic and earnest Trump Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff, on whom the hostages’ families have built so much hope — would be only too pleased to see him.
Nonetheless, however, it is Trump who selected this man to represent America when rewarding Hamas for its monstrous assault on October 7 by giving it unprecedented legitimacy at direct negotiations.
And, ultimately, it is Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu who left the vacuum into which Trump decided to insert Boehler.
For months, Netanyahu chose not to strive for the implementation of the hostage-ceasefire deal that he and his ministers approved and conveyed to the US in May. And after the protracted weekly rounds of phase one implementation — of agonizing hostage releases, prisoner releases and a ceasefire — had finally begun in January, Netanyahu then chose not to press on to phase two of the deal, when some 24 living hostages stand to be released in exchange for many more freed terrorists, a full IDF withdrawal from Gaza and a permanent ceasefire. Consequently, Hamas since March 1 — outrageously and untenably — has been enjoying all the benefits of a cessation of war without releasing any hostages.
It was Netanyahu, too, who elected to sideline Mossad chief David Barnea and Shin Bet head Ronen Bar from the negotiations — men whose life’s work has been dedicated to the security of Israel — and instead install Dermer, who ostensibly speaks Trump. Yet Dermer was blindsided by the president and his envoy Boehler.
However dissatisfied Netanyahu may profess himself to have been by the Barnea-Bar conduct of negotiations, they, unlike Boehler, have no delusions about Hamas’s strategic genocidal intentions.
Indeed, it has been their conviction, and that of the IDF brass, that Israel should have pressed ahead with the hostage-ceasefire deal months ago, and urgently secured the release of all the hostages, prioritizing that obligation over the need to destroy Hamas. Because, after all, as they know — but Boehler apparently doesn’t — Hamas can be relied upon to breach the ceasefire any and every which way it can, and Israel will have every reason and legitimacy to resume a hopefully more effective campaign once the hostages are home.
Now, Netanyahu has lost control of strategy and tactics in the battle against Hamas — to a US president who has publicly welcomed released hostages to his office, ascertained that the Israeli public overwhelmingly prioritizes the return of the rest of the hostages over a return to the war, and concluded that he can handle this better than Netanyahu.
A US president who, it must now be hoped, will relieve the burden of ongoing negotiations from an envoy who, after interview after interview in which he was given a platform to explain what he has been up to, wound up needing to clarify that Hamas are “BY DEFINITION BAD people.”
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