The Biden team’s offer to trade Yahya Sinwar, the man believed to be the mastermind of the Oct. 7 attack, for guarantees that the Israeli military stay out of Rafah points to two disturbing truths about the current conflict in the Middle East. The first is that the U.S. knows plenty about what the Hamas terror group is doing and has done. The second is that Washington has been keeping key information—like the terror leader’s whereabouts—from the Israelis, thereby prolonging the war that it claims to decry.

The implications of the administration’s offer, relayed in a recent Washington Post article, has Israelis and U.S. pro-Israel activists livid. Israel’s former ambassador to the U.S. Michael Oren, for instance, posted on X, “I am shocked and sickened by reports that the U.S. is withholding from Israel vital information on the whereabouts of senior Hamas leaders in Gaza. Is the administration still our ally?”

The Biden administration is making the offer because all its efforts to end Israel’s war have failed and if Rafah falls, Hamas is likely to fall, too. It seems there’s no other way to preserve a pillar of what the White House calls “regional integration”—a euphemism for the U.S.-Iran alliance system that Barack Obama has tried to impose on the Middle East for the last decade.

Leaks that the Biden administration is withholding actionable intelligence on Hamas’ paramount leader in Gaza confirm that, as Tablet reported shortly after the Oct. 7 massacre, the administration had a wealth of intelligence on the terror group and its plans. If U.S. intelligence agencies are confident that they know where Sinwar is squirreled away now, in the chaos of wartime, they also knew what he was doing in the lead-up to the massive attack.