The Biden administration is really pushing the limits of “better late than never.” The president and his team have finally begun acknowledging what has been all too obvious: Hamas is the reason there has been no second ceasefire deal.

After falsely blaming Israel for months, the president’s team has pivoted to the truth. It’s not clear why. Maybe the backlash to Biden effectively blamed Benjamin Netanyahu instead of the actual barbarians who shot the hostages this past weekend convinced the White House to switch gears. That would be nice. Who knows.

Late last night, Axios—the Biden White House’s chosen vehicle for mouthpiecing its Israel-related positions and policy shifts—reported the following: “One of the main questions raised during a meeting President Biden and Vice President Harris had with their national security team on Monday was whether there is a hostage-release and ceasefire in Gaza deal Hamas would ever agree to, U.S. officials said.”

To be clear: the administration has been (mostly) blaming Israel for the failure of a deal that they now acknowledge never fully materialized. Further, while Biden & Co. know there are versions of the deal that Israel would accept, they have yet to be convinced Hamas has any interest in any version.

It’s important to remember that these conclusions reached by Biden’s team are the result of months-long negotiations, and therefore Hamas’s obstructionism is by definition not a new problem. The administration didn’t just figure this out; it has known that Hamas’s intransigence has been the status quo for months. And officials from the president on down have chosen, in that time period, repeatedly to castigate Netanyahu.

There’s no reason to sugarcoat it. Biden and Harris have been egging on the societal divides in Israel and undermining its political stability on false pretenses.

So Biden gets no credit for finally acknowledging, through a carefully placed leak, that he has been purposely misleading the American people on why one of their fellow citizens was just executed in Gaza. The same is true for Kamala Harris, though the implications for her are even worse. Harris has been using false information to turn the public against Israel in order to lay the groundwork for a cooling of relations with our ally.

As for the specifics of the deal being crafted, we can look to reporting from the Jerusalem Post. The language in most of the deal has been agreed upon, but the final sticking points are really and truly stuck, for the moment. The reason for that is Hamas.

“Proponents of the deal have accused Netanyahu of thwarting it, arguing that a deal could have been reached if only he would agree to withdraw from the Philadelphi Corridor. [A] US official, however, drew an opposite picture that focused on problems over the hostage-prisoner swap, while accusing Hamas of harming the chances of a deal.”

What’s the problem, exactly? Well, Hamas is, you know, executing the hostages it is supposed to be preparing to hand over to Israel as part of the deal.

“There’s a list of hostages, and we all have it, and Hamas has had it, and all the parties have had it, and there are now fewer names on the list,” according to the US official.

Hamas has been cagey all along about which hostages are even still alive—and those who are alive today may be executed by Hamas tomorrow. How does one make a deal with such an entity? The answer is, one usually doesn’t.

Even on the Philadelphi corridor, some context shows why blaming Bibi has always been disingenuous. Israel took operational control of the corridor in late May. Days later, Biden announced that Israel had agreed to a deal backed by his own administration. The ball was in Hamas’s court. What appears to have happened is this: The deal had Israel redeploying troops away from densely populated areas in the first phase, and Hamas tried to shoehorn the Philadelphi corridor into this category—that is, territory from which the IDF would redeploy.

Israel has agreed to leave the corridor in a second phase of the deal and leave a sparse crew along the corridor in the first phase. This is reasonable and also obviously consistent with the deal’s terms. But Hamas doesn’t like it, so they are trying to convince American mediators to change the deal and put Philadelphi in a category to which it clearly doesn’t belong.

Biden and Harris have been misrepresenting the situation for monthsbout because it has been politically convenient—especially for Harris, who fears losing Arab voters in Michigan if she stops giving credence to Hamas talking points.

But Hamas’s execution of the hostages has made that impossible. Unfortunately, we can’t go back in time to when this false narrative took hold, which means the damage cannot be undone. But there is now no excuse, going forward, for anyone to claim Hamas is dealing in good faith.