A Biden administration official said on Friday that efforts to get Americans and other foreign nationals out of the Gaza Strip, a process that finally began on Wednesday, had been held up by Hamas’ trying to get its own wounded fighters included among those to be escorted into Egypt through the Rafah gate.

The explanation offered the first window into the kinds of details that were being negotiated with the leadership of Hamas, even as Israel began a campaign of airstrikes in response to the slaughter of 1,400 people and the taking of more than 200 hostages by Hamas terrorists in attacks on Israel on October 7 launched from Gaza. Hamas rules Gaza politically and also has an armed wing whose fighters are embedded within the enclave’s civilian population.

People holding dual, US or other foreign citizenship repeatedly gathered at the gate, at Gaza’s southern border, starting shortly after October 7. But for weeks, the Rafah crossing remained closed. For most of that time, US officials said only that Hamas was preventing the departure of foreign nationals.

On Friday, a senior administration official provided more detail about those demands. The official said Hamas repeatedly provided to Israel, the US and Egypt lists of Palestinians who had been wounded and should be allowed to depart with the Americans and others. But vetting showed that many of them, the official said, were Hamas fighters.

The official said that about one-third of the wounded Palestinians on the first list were Hamas fighters and that allowing them to exit Gaza was unacceptable to officials in Egypt, the US and Israel.