The War That Would Not End: Inside the year-long American effort to release the hostages, end the fighting in Gaza, and bring peace to the Middle East

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[The Biden administration] assigned itself a larger mission than full-throated solidarity in the aftermath of the attack. It wanted to avert a regional war that might ensnare the United States. It aspired to broker an end to the conflict, and to liberate the estimated 251 hostages that Hamas had kidnapped and taken to the Gaza Strip. It sought a Gaza free from Hamas’s rule, and the dismantlement of the group’s military capabilities. And despite the scale of those tasks, it accelerated its pursuit of the Saudi normalization deal.

What follows is a history of those efforts: a reconstruction of 11 months of earnest, energetic diplomacy, based on interviews with two dozen participants at the highest levels of government, both in America and across the Middle East.