On October 6, 2023, Brett McGurk believed that a Middle East peace deal was within reach—that the Biden administration just might succeed where every administration before it had failed.
McGurk, the White House coordinator for the Middle East and North Africa, was meeting in his office with a group of Saudi diplomats, drawing up a blueprint for a Palestinian state. It was the centerpiece of a grand bargain: In exchange for a Palestinian state, Saudi Arabia would normalize diplomatic relations with Israel. At a moment when Israel was growing internationally isolated, the nation that styled itself the leader of the Muslim world would embrace it.
The officials were there to begin hammering out the necessary details. The Saudis had assigned experts to redesign Palestine’s electrical grid and welfare system. The plan also laid out steps that the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank would need to take to expunge corruption from its administrative apparatus.
At approximately 11 p.m., several hours after the meeting adjourned, the whole vision abruptly shattered. McGurk received a text from Israel’s ambassador to the United States, Michael Herzog. “Israel is under attack,” Herzog wrote. McGurk quickly responded, “We are with you.”
Just after nine the next morning, Secretary of State Antony Blinken arrived at the White House. Blinken had planned to travel to Saudi Arabia that week to further flesh out the vision for a Palestinian state with the crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman. Now Blinken stepped into the Oval Office with McGurk to brief President Joe Biden about Hamas’s attack on southern Israel.
They couldn’t present Biden with a full picture; the Israeli Defense Forces were still fighting battles with Hamas across the south. The president had a simple question: “How much worse is it going to get?”
As video footage capturing Hamas’s rampage began to emerge, aides showed it to Biden. He absorbed an account of Israeli children murdered in front of their parents. “This is on a different level of savagery,” he told McGurk.
When Biden spoke by phone with Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister sounded shaken. Netanyahu told Biden that Hamas’s invasion might be a prelude to an apocalyptic assault on the Jewish state, emerging from every direction. “In the Middle East, if you’re seen as weak, you’re roadkill,” Netanyahu said. “You cannot be seen as weak. And we need to respond to this, and we need the U.S. to be with us. If not, all of our enemies are going to be coming after us.”
Biden’s response to Netanyahu was, in essence, what McGurk had texted Herzog: We’re with you. But the 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. The administration faced an impossible situation, and for nearly a year, it has somehow managed to forestall a regional expansion of the war. But it has yet to find a way to release the hostages, bring the fighting to a halt, or put a broader peace process back on track. That makes this history an anatomy of a failure—the story of an overextended superpower and its aging president, unable to exert themselves decisively in a moment of crisis.
I.
The Bear Trap
October 11
Above all else, Joe Biden—who could remember the dawn of the atomic age, when schoolkids practiced hiding under their desk—feared escalation. When presented with the chance to send more potent arms to Ukraine, he would ask, “Will this increase the likelihood of nuclear war?” And four days after the Hamas attack, it seemed as if his abiding fear of a crisis spinning out of control was about to be realized.
At 7:48 a.m., Biden’s national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, received a call from Tel Aviv. A trio of Netanyahu’s top national security advisers—Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, Minister of Strategic Affairs Ron Dermer, and National Security Adviser Tzachi Hanegbi—told Sullivan they were convinced that Hezbollah was about to launch a war on Israel from Lebanon. And they said their cabinet preferred to initiate the war preemptively.
Since October 8, Hezbollah, an Iranian proxy committed to Israel’s destruction, had been firing rockets at northern Israel, in a display of solidarity with Hamas. Hamas’s invasion had caught Hezbollah and its longtime leader, Hassan Nasrallah, by surprise. Nasrallah, who had envisioned leading his own invasion of Israel, was irked that Hamas had moved first, and annoyed that it had failed to give him the courtesy of a warning.
Hezbollah’s initial salvos seemed calibrated to assure Israel that it didn’t want a full-blown conflict. But now Israel could see Hezbollah units mobilizing just across the border. The Iranian-backed militia had begun using tactical radios, a telltale sign that it was preparing for war.
At 9:55 a.m., Biden called Netanyahu to talk through the potential ramifications of a preemptive attack on Hezbollah. Biden understood that the Israeli leadership, having failed to avert the last attack on the homeland, was panicked at the prospect of missing another. He told the prime minister: “If you launch this attack, you’re guaranteeing a major Middle East war. If you don’t, there’s a lot we can do to deter that. If Hezbollah attacks, I’m with you all the way. If you start the attack, that’s a much different picture. Let’s take our time.”
Just as the president began his call, McGurk received a message via a back channel that he used to communicate with the Iranians. They wanted the White House to know that they opposed Hezbollah’s entry into the war and were trying to calm tensions. Iran might have been lying, but Sullivan passed the message along to Dermer, hoping to persuade the Israeli cabinet to delay a preemptive strike.
Right when the administration felt as if its arguments had broken through, Sullivan stepped out of the Oval Office to take another call from Dermer. Hezbollah militants, Dermer told him, had drifted across the border in paragliders just as Hamas had done four days earlier; its gunmen had opened fire on a funeral. These reports, Dermer said, had tipped the cabinet debate in favor of attacking.
Sullivan called CIA Director William Burns and General Erik Kurilla, the head of U.S. Central Command, which oversees U.S. military operations across the greater Middle East. Neither could corroborate the reports of paragliders entering Israeli territory.
Sullivan scrambled to get Dermer on the phone, but couldn’t reach him. He managed to track down Dermer’s chief of staff, who said his boss was locked in a cabinet meeting. Sullivan dictated a short note to Dermer: You’re not making rational decisions. You’re acting in the fog of war on the basis of bad intelligence.
Forty-five minutes after Sullivan’s note, Dermer called to tell him that the cabinet would heed Biden’s advice; it had voted against striking Hezbollah. The Israelis had determined that no militants were paragliding into the country. By the narrowest of margins, Israel avoided going to war because of a failure to distinguish Hezbollah fighters from a flock of birds.
October 13
Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, who had argued vociferously for a preemptive attack on Hezbollah, was peeved that the Americans had pressured Israel to wait. Now it was U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin’s job to wrap his arms around his distraught counterpart. The Biden administration was trying to smother Israel with reassurance so that it could nudge Israeli policy makers in its preferred direction.
The administration believed that the Israelis were on the brink of executing a brutal, poorly conceived war plan in Gaza. In fact, it was barely a plan. On October 7, the IDF didn’t have the schematics for a ground invasion of Gaza on the shelf.
In the dazed aftermath of the massacre, the army had quickly cobbled one together. American officials considered the proposed assault to be intolerably blunt: a brief warning to evacuate, followed by bombardment, followed by 30,000 troops barreling into Gaza.
As Austin and Gallant met in the Kirya, the sprawling campus in Tel Aviv that houses the Ministry of Defense, the American tried to gently, and Socratically, express his skepticism. Austin believed that he and Gallant were talking soldier to soldier, so he described the hard lessons he’d learned while overseeing the battle of Mosul in the war against the Islamic State: “You’ve got to take into account how you’re going to address civilians.”
He also urged Gallant to consider how allocating so much of the IDF’s resources to Gaza would create a vulnerability that Hezbollah might exploit.
Austin kept pressing, “How does this end?”
There was no clear answer.
After his own consoling visit to Tel Aviv, Antony Blinken sprinted across the capitals of the Middle East. In Doha, where the political leadership of Hamas resided in luxurious exile, Blinken arrived to tell the emir of Qatar, Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, that the U.S. wanted him to consider evicting Hamas from his country.
But the emir had a complaint of his own: “We’ve been talking to Hamas, and Hamas is ready to release some of the hostages.” In return, Hamas wanted Israel to pause the air strikes that had been pounding Gaza. “We’ve been trying to talk to the Israelis,” the emir said. “We can’t get anyone to focus on it.”
The problem, as the emir explained it, was that Hamas had succeeded beyond its most extravagant expectations on October 7, not simply murdering more Jews than it anticipated, but seizing more hostages than it could manage.
In his diplomatic deadpan, Blinken replied, “I will follow up on this.” But some of his aides were gobsmacked. They couldn’t believe that Israel would pass up an opportunity to rescue women and children kidnapped into Gaza. As soon as Blinken boarded his plane, he called Dermer.
Dermer said that he would get to work on it. But throughout October, Biden-administration officials kept finding themselves struck by the Israeli government’s unwillingness to explore hostage negotiations. Perhaps it was just the chaos that reigned in the aftermath of the attacks, but they began to feel as if there was a stark difference in outlook: Where the Americans were prepared to negotiate with Hamas, the Israelis wanted to obliterate it. Where the Americans worried about hostages dying in captivity, Israel retained confidence in its ability to stage daring rescues.
The Americans believed that the threat of invasion gave the Israelis leverage over Hamas. The best chance at extricating women and children from the tunnels of Gaza, they thought, was before the IDF began a ground operation—a fleeting opportunity that might never come again.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken arrives in Israel on October 16, 2023, after discussions in six Arab states to coordinate efforts against Hamas and address Gaza’s humanitarian crisis. (Jacquelyn Martin / AFP / Getty )
October 16
As Blinken toured the region, Israel began to bombard Gaza with an intensity that unnerved otherwise sympathetic Arab leaders. In Amman and Riyadh, Cairo and Abu Dhabi, Sunni heads of state privately intimated that they wished for the resounding defeat of Hamas, the Palestine branch of the fundamentalist Muslim Brotherhood movement that threatened their own regimes. They also accused Netanyahu of bringing catastrophe upon his country by allowing Qatari money to strengthen Hamas’s rule of Gaza—the other Gulf States resented Qatar’s support for the Muslim Brotherhood—despite their emphatic warnings about the dangers of that arrangement. But Israel was making it difficult for them to remain neutral. Hearing the Arabs’ complaints, Blinken decided to add one last stop on his tour, a return visit to Israel, where he would press Netanyahu to allow aid into Gaza.
Before he landed, he felt sure that the Israelis would accede to allowing trucks full of basic goods to enter the Strip. In the parlance of diplomacy, that agreement was “prebaked.”
But when Blinken visited Netanyahu, the prime minister balked.
Netanyahu told Blinken that he would negotiate the matter with Biden when he arrived in two days. Blinken replied that the president wouldn’t board a plane without a humanitarian agreement in place.
It was lunchtime, and Blinken retreated to the acting ambassador’s home in Jerusalem, hoping that Netanyahu would reconsider in his absence.
At 6 p.m., Blinken met Netanyahu at the Kirya. But the hours apart had done nothing to resolve the differences. Netanyahu kept arguing that his hands were tied. “I have got people in the cabinet who don’t want an aspirin to get into Gaza because of what’s happened.” Ministers wanted to inflict collective punishment. “That’s not me,” he added, “but that’s people in my coalition.”
An air-raid siren cut their discussion short, sending them to a tightly packed bunker, where Netanyahu, Blinken, and Gallant awkwardly passed the time. When they returned to their meeting, Netanyahu ended it. He told Blinken that he needed to discuss everything with his cabinet. He left the secretary and his staff in a bureaucrat’s small underground office, so deep that it had no cellular connection, while Netanyahu ran his meeting several doors down.
Periodically, members of the cabinet would emerge and present the Americans with a new proposal. Gallant suggested building a new railway system to transport aid, rather than allowing trucks into Gaza.
Netanyahu suggested that Israel could send a team to Gaza to assess the situation.
“You can’t eat an assessment,” Blinken responded.
Blinken held the leverage: the promise of the presidential visit that Netanyahu craved.
At 1 a.m., Netanyahu said that Israel would open the Rafah border crossing, which connected Gaza with Egypt. But he also insisted on sitting with Blinken for another hour, drafting the announcement of the agreement. Once they’d hashed out a statement, they walked into a closet to make a copy. Netanyahu couldn’t figure out how to operate the machine. He just stood there, punching buttons.
October 17–18
Air Force One was supposed to leave for Israel in a matter of hours, but Brett McGurk had forgotten his passport at home. Weaving his way through traffic in Washington, he heard a news report on the radio that a rocket had just struck Al-Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza City, killing 500 civilians. Shit, he exclaimed to himself; what’s going on? Before he had time to think, Israeli officials began lighting up his phone, denying responsibility for the strike.
Twenty minutes later, back at the White House, he found the president huddled with Jake Sullivan, along with Steve Ricchetti and Mike Donilon, advisers who occupied Biden’s innermost circle. King Abdullah of Jordan called. Amman was supposed to be Biden’s second destination. He didn’t want Biden coming to his country at such a sensitive moment.
As aides began to debate canceling the trip, Biden called Netanyahu, who quickly said, “It wasn’t us. I’ll get you all the intel.” He promised that by the time Biden landed, he would be able to show definitively that Israel hadn’t bombed the hospital. McGurk wasn’t so sure. But Biden concluded that he couldn’t tolerate the consequences of calling off the trip. The Israelis needed him.
(Proof soon came that the hospital had been hit by an errant rocket fired by the Iran-affiliated Palestinian Islamic Jihad movement.)
While Air Force One made its way through the night, Biden kept revising the speech he would deliver to the Israeli public. The president had long described himself as a Zionist, with sympathy for the Jewish people cultivated in him by his father. He had so many Jews on his staff that he sometimes joked with them about “our people.” Now, at Israel’s moment of greatest need, he wanted to be its friendly uncle, Ray-Bans dangling from his hand, dispensing hard-earned wisdom.
The October 7 attack had sapped Netanyahu of self-confidence. It had taken him more than a week to meet with hostages’ families; he was avoiding the public, which blamed him for the security failure. After Biden arrived in Tel Aviv, he wasn’t just bucking up the prime minister; he was, in effect, executing the parts of the job that Netanyahu couldn’t manage in his stunned detachment.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu hugs President Joe Biden upon his arrival at Ben-Gurion airport on October 18, 2023. (Brendan Smialowski / AFP / Getty)
For hours, Biden huddled with the Israeli war cabinet. To the world, that meeting looked as if Biden was claiming ownership of Israel’s coming military campaign. The bear hug risked becoming a bear trap.
But it wasn’t his war to run; all he could do was pose questions about the planned invasion of Gaza.
Biden was trying to get the Israelis to pause long enough to regain their emotional equilibrium and better calibrate their response. He offered to send three generals to lend their experience by poking holes in Israel’s plans and making suggestions. The Israelis had little desire to accept advice. But Biden was sitting in Tel Aviv, and an offer from the superpower that would help defend them in a war against Iran wasn’t something they could decline.
October 27
After his visit, Biden began to ratchet up the pressure. He wanted Netanyahu to refrain from launching a ground invasion. Instead of capturing major urban centers or displacing civilian populations, he urged Israel to consider waging a counterterrorism campaign, with a series of surgical raids and strikes against Hamas’s leadership and infrastructure.
The Israeli war cabinet dismissed the president’s alternative because it would leave Hamas intact and, the Israelis worried, able to carry out another assault like October 7. But Israel didn’t want to broadcast differences of opinion with the Americans to their enemies. Quietly, Netanyahu told Biden that he had to go in.
The invasion plan, however, was scaled back. Israel would send a fraction of the soldiers it initially intended in order to capture Gaza City, the hub of Hamas’s command-and-control structure. After a brief pause, the army would continue to Khan Younis, the epicenter of the tunnel network. The war would be over by Christmas.
What the Israelis described was much more aggressive than Biden’s plan. But the administration considered it well reasoned, not an overreaction. It made provisions to protect civilian life.
Twenty days after October 7, the IDF cut cell service in the Gaza Strip. It seized the beach road into Palestinian territory, then curved toward Gaza City. Netanyahu told his nation, “This is the second stage of the war.”
Blinken attends a meeting with Egyptian Foreign Minister Sameh Shoukry and Palestine Liberation Organization Executive Committee Secretary General Hussein al-Sheikh on November 4, 2023. (Jonathan Ernst / AP)
November 24
All of the American warnings about the battle for Gaza City included premonitions of a high number of Israeli casualties. But only about 70 IDF soldiers died in the fighting. The Israelis succeeded in trouncing Hamas in the north far more efficiently than their leaders had dared hope. That victory presented a diplomatic opportunity, because the IDF had always intended to pause its attacks after the battle anyway.
Biden assigned Burns, the CIA director, to pursue a cease-fire deal. The rumpled, self-effacing spymaster was also the administration’s most experienced diplomat, a former deputy secretary of state who had earlier served as ambassador to Jordan and then Russia. Biden liked to hand Burns tasks that would otherwise have flowed to the secretary of state. Unlike Blinken, the CIA director could travel the world unannounced, without a retinue of reporters trailing him. And he had relationships with the two figures who, in theory, had the greatest chance of persuading Hamas to come to the table: Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani, known as MBAR, Qatar’s prime minister and foreign minister, and Abbas Kamel, Egypt’s intelligence chief.
The two countries held sway over different corners of Hamas. Qatar served as the primary patron of the group’s exiled political wing, which had relocated to Doha in 2012. Egypt, abutting the Gaza Strip, shared the management of the Rafah border crossing with Hamas. It had a direct relationship with the militants waging war.
To influence the course of the conflict, the negotiators needed the assent of one man, Hamas’s top leader in Gaza, Yahya Sinwar. His brutality toward Israelis; his indifference, at best, to the death of Palestinian civilians; his sense of theological certainty about his mission; and his resignation to the possibility of his own death made him an almost impossible negotiating partner.
Even so, Sinwar thought strategically. He’d spent many years in an Israeli prison, where he’d learned Hebrew and voraciously consumed news from international sources. And the hostage negotiators benefited from a fleeting confluence of interests: Sinwar wanted to release the babies and small children among the hostages; having militants change diapers was not the end goal of his operation.
When the four-day cease-fire deal began—50 hostages released in exchange for 150 Palestinian prisoners and a four-day pause in the fighting—Burns remained in a state of constant anxiety. Israel said it would extend the cease-fire an additional day for each 10 additional hostages Hamas released. According to the deal, the hostages and prisoners exchanged were limited to women and children.
Each day, when the two sides published the names of those to be released, Burns braced himself for an objection that would cause the tentative peace to collapse. The Biden administration had successfully prodded the Israelis to develop a more nuanced, more realistic battle plan—and to prioritize the release of the hostages. The benefits of its diplomacy were on display in the faces of the 105 hostages who returned to their families. (Twenty-three Thai nationals and a Filipino were freed in a separate deal.) Then, after seven days, everything fell apart.
Blinken departs Tel Aviv for Jordan on November 3, 2023. (Jonathan Ernst / AFP / Getty)
II.
The Dream Palace
Early December
In Gaza, the suffering was immense. As the fighting resumed, NGOs operating in the territory reported a humanitarian catastrophe: widespread hunger, a water system that had stopped functioning, a surge in infectious diseases, a near-total breakdown of the public-health apparatus. Although the death toll was subject to fierce dispute, and estimates rarely attempted to disentangle civilian and military casualties, the numbers were nonetheless harrowing. By early December, approximately 15,000 people had died. The Financial Times described northern Gaza as “virtually uninhabitable.” The Wall Street Journal called the conflict “comparable in scale to the most devastating urban warfare in the modern record.”
A backlash against Biden’s support for Israel was growing, not just among pro-Palestinian activists, but within the administration itself. In early December, a group of White House interns published an anonymous letter accusing the president of callously ignoring civilian deaths. A State Department official resigned in protest. Dissent began to filter into the Situation Room. A group that included Jon Finer, the deputy head of the National Security Council, and Phil Gordon, national security adviser to Vice President Kamala Harris, quietly complained about Israeli tactics.
Brett McGurk would push back against the complaints, invoking his stint overseeing the siege of Mosul during the Obama administration, as the U.S. attempted to drive ISIS from northern Iraq: We flattened the city. There’s nothing left. What standard are you holding these Israelis to?
It was an argument bolstered by a classified cable sent by the U.S. embassy in Israel in late fall. American officials had embedded in IDF operating centers, reviewing its procedures for ordering air strikes. The cable concluded that the Israeli standards for protecting civilians and calculating the risks of bombardment were not so different from those used by the U.S. military.
When State Department officials chastised them over the mounting civilian deaths, Israeli officials liked to make the very same point. Herzl Halevi, the IDF chief of staff, brought up his own education at an American war college. He recalled asking a U.S. general how many civilian deaths would be acceptable in pursuit of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the jihadist leader of the anti-American insurgency in Iraq. The general replied, I don’t even understand the question. As Halevi now explained to the U.S. diplomats, Everything we do, we learned at your colleges.
December 14–15
When the Israelis first outlined their campaign, they estimated that it would be over by Christmas, as if they would deliver an end to the conflict as a holiday gift for their American benefactor. Then they would shift to a counterterrorism operation using precision raids and targeted operations, just as Biden wanted.
But Christmas was little more than a week away—and an end to the war seemed distant. Jake Sullivan went to Tel Aviv to press the war cabinet to conclude the operation.
The Israelis assured Sullivan that the end would come soon enough. They were about to eliminate a substantial portion of the underground tunnel system, to break the military capacity of their enemy. They simply needed a few more weeks, until the end of January, or perhaps February.
“This is starting to sound like just basically smashing your way around the entire Strip indefinitely,” Sullivan told them.
Despite his empathy for Israel, he had arrived at a dispiriting conclusion: The government had no plausible theory of victory, no idea how it might wrap up the conflict.
December 23
Sullivan’s doubts stoked Biden’s frustrations. He was suffering politically on Israel’s behalf, heckled at his public appearances by protesters and at odds with a faction of his own party, but Netanyahu didn’t seem to care. The lack of reciprocity angered Biden. He was learning the hard way what his predecessors in the Oval Office had also learned the hard way: Netanyahu was not a give-and-take negotiating partner.
Biden called Netanyahu with a long list of concerns, urging him to release tax revenue that Israel owed to the Palestinian Authority, the government in the West Bank, which Netanyahu was always trying to undermine in his quest to prevent the establishment of an autonomous, fully functioning state there.
“You can’t let the PA collapse,” Biden told him. “We’re going to have a West Bank catastrophe to go with the Gaza catastrophe.”
As Netanyahu began to push back, Biden couldn’t contain his pique and barked into the phone, We’re done.
They wouldn’t speak again for almost a month.
Antony Blinken meets with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in al-Ula, Saudi Arabia, on January 8. (Chuck Kennedy / State Department / Anadolu / Getty)
January 8
Al-Ula was the realization of Mohammed bin Salman’s dreams—a remote oasis that had come to represent the young monarch’s theory of modernization, how he would turn his country into the spear tip of the 21st century. In the middle of the desert, he had erected a destination brimming with five-star resorts and luxurious spas. There was even a plan to build a satellite branch of the Centre Pompidou.
The Saudi crown prince, known as MBS, maintained winter quarters at al-Ula. He took meetings in a tent lined with thick rugs and plush cushions. This is where he greeted Blinken, who arrived at dusk in pursuit of his own dream, a vision that traced back to the earliest days of the Biden presidency, when McGurk had traveled to the kingdom.
Biden took office spoiling for a fight with the Saudis. During the campaign, he had announced his intention of turning the kingdom into a “pariah.” But after McGurk explained the sanctions that the administration was about to impose on Saudi Arabia, he found himself on the receiving end of one of the prince’s flights of enthusiasm. MBS disarmed McGurk by announcing his desire to normalize relations with Israel, following the path that the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain had traveled a few months earlier with the signing of the Abraham Accords.
Netanyahu kept offering tantalizing hints of his own enthusiasm for the same vision. Two years after McGurk’s visit, in early 2023, the prime minister called Biden and told him that he was prepared to reconfigure his coalition to build domestic support for a deal. Netanyahu would first have to overcome his lifelong aversion to a Palestinian state, because that was a nonnegotiable Saudi demand. But he said that he was willing to go there, even if he had to break with the theocrats in his coalition to make it happen.
And in the early fall of 2023, the administration moved ever closer to hatching a normalization deal between the old adversaries. The deal was a grand bargain: Saudi Arabia and the United States would enter into a mutual-defense treaty, which required Senate ratification. The United States would help the Saudis build a nuclear-power program for civilian purposes, and in return Saudi Arabia would remain committed to the dominance of the U.S. dollar and American interests in the region.
The events of October 7 seemed destined to doom the deal. When Blinken visited MBS soon after the attack, the crown prince could hardly contain his anxiety about the prospect of anti-Israel protests in his streets, about the prospect of a regional war.
But in Blinken’s head, the contours of the deal still felt as relevant as ever. The administration began to imagine its diplomacy proceeding along two separate, but deeply interconnected, tracks. It would cut one deal with Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, Jordan, and Morocco, which would have some of those countries supply troops to stabilize Gaza in the aftermath of the war. And then it would cut a separate deal with the Saudis, who would not only recognize Israel but also fund the reconstruction of Gaza.
Blinken had come to al-Ula looking for a signal from MBS that such a deal was still plausible.
As they settled in the tent, MBS shocked Blinken. A hardened piece of Washington conventional wisdom held that MBS felt a kinship, born of shared authoritarian tendencies, with Donald Trump. But after the 2018 murder of the Washington Post contributor Jamal Khashoggi, MBS had become a voracious student of American politics. He spoke frequently with Senator Lindsey Graham, a close ally of Trump’s, and those conversations helped lead him to a fresh analysis of Saudi interests. (In the capitals of the Middle East, Graham is viewed as a potential secretary of state in a second Trump administration, so his opinions are given weight.)
[From the April 2022 issue: Graeme Wood on the crown prince, a murder, and the future of Saudi Arabia]
MBS told Blinken that the Biden administration represented his best chance for realizing his plans: Two-thirds of the Senate needed to ratify any Saudi-U.S. defense pact, and he believed that could happen only in a Democratic administration, which could help deliver progressives’ votes by building a Palestinian state into the deal. He had to move quickly, before the November election risked returning Trump to power.
“What do you need from Israel?” Blinken wanted to know.
Above all, MBS said, he needed calm in Gaza. Blinken asked if the Saudis could tolerate Israel periodically reentering the territory to conduct counterrorism raids. “They can come back in six months, a year, but not on the back end of my signing something like this,” MBS replied.
He began to talk about the imperative of an Israeli commitment to Palestinian statehood.
“Seventy percent of my population is younger than me,” the 38-year-old ruler explained. “For most of them, they never really knew much about the Palestinian issue. And so they’re being introduced to it for the first time through this conflict. It’s a huge problem. Do I care personally about the Palestinian issue? I don’t, but my people do, so I need to make sure this is meaningful.” (A Saudi official described this account of the conversation as “incorrect.”)
He wanted Blinken to know that he was pursuing this deal at the greatest personal risk. The example of the assassinated former Egyptian President Anwar Sadat weighed on him, an unshakable demonstration that the Muslim Brotherhood would wait patiently to exact murderous revenge on an Arab leader willing to make peace with Israel.
“Half my advisers say that the deal is not worth the risk,” he said. “I could end up getting killed because of this deal.”
January 9
Blinken hoped that Netanyahu still hungered for diplomatic relations with Saudi Arabia. Normalization would, after all, be the capstone of what the prime minister considered his legacy project: brokering peace with the Arab Gulf States. And, in MBS’s view, it would almost certainly create space for other Muslim nations to follow: Qatar, Indonesia, Bangladesh, Pakistan, a slew of African states.
Iran was the force that could weld together this unlikely coalition. The Islamic Republic’s aspirations to regional hegemony, its pursuit of nuclear weapons, and its willingness to fund and train militant groups frightened both the Middle East’s Sunni Arab rulers and its Israeli leaders. By working together, though, Israel and the Sunni states might be able to contain Iran. It was a plausible enough vision, but it had failed to account for an Iranian veto.
If October 7 was designed to halt Israeli-Arab rapprochement, it had been wildly successful. And the only hope of reviving the process rested on Netanyahu overcoming a deeply ingrained instinct. Ever since losing his premiership in 1999, after making concessions to the Palestinians under pressure from the Clinton administration, he’d seemed determined never to alienate the Israeli right wing again. He almost always choked when forced to utter the words Palestinian state.
Sitting with Netanyahu, Blinken asked if he wanted to continue pursuing a deal with MBS. “If you’re not serious about this it’s good to know, because we can just close up shop here.”
Netanyahu said he remained emphatically interested.
Spelling out the obvious, Blinken told him that he would need to publicly express his support for Palestinian statehood. Netanyahu replied that he could find a way to make that commitment, although he allowed that it might take some finessing of language.
When Blinken mentioned that MBS also needed calm in Gaza, Netanyahu said that he could supply that, too.
After they finished their private discussion, Blinken joined Netanyahu in a cabinet meeting. Rather than seeking to restore calm, however, the ministers were discussing plans for ramping up the war. Netanyahu said nothing to contradict them.
As they left the meeting, Blinken grabbed him and said, “Prime Minister, what we just heard there—it’s not consistent with what we talked about in your office.”
He replied, “I know. I’m working on it.”
January 31
Beneath central Gaza City, the Israelis experienced the shock of another intelligence failure. Of course they knew about the tunnels of Gaza. In the popular vernacular of the prewar era, they were dubbed the Metro. But as the IDF cleared Hamas from the city and began to burrow beneath it, it was stunned by the branching passageways it encountered. The Israelis began to refer to it as the Kingdom. They realized that the tunnels were far deeper than they had known. And as the army moved into Khan Younis, it began to comprehend their scale. It was possible, the Israelis estimated, that as many as 450 miles of tunnel were beneath the Strip.
The network had been built to withstand an Israeli invasion. Entryways were booby-trapped. Steel blast doors protected living quarters so that they could withstand air strikes. Militants’ apartments were adorned with ceramic tile to create a comforting illusion of home. The tunnels contained machinery to manufacture the long-range rockets that Hamas periodically launched at civilian targets in Israel. It was even possible to drive a car through the widest passageways.
The discovery of the full extent of the system extended Israel’s timeline. Conquering the subterranean world was painstaking, perilous work; fanciful schemes, such as pumping the passages full of seawater, failed to clear the tunnels. And the IDF kept uncovering computers filled with revelatory information, leading it to new targets.
Israeli soldiers stumbled into Yahya Sinwar’s lair under the city of Khan Younis soon after he had fled, leaving behind bags of cash that he desperately needed. The near miss was a forking moment: Killing Sinwar might have allowed Israel to feel the catharsis that comes with retribution, opening the way to negotiate an end to the war.
In the months that followed, Sinwar was the lizard that grew back its tail. After the IDF would crush his battalions, it would then withdraw its troops. Israel didn’t want to become an occupying force, with the casualties and burdens that would entail. The world didn’t want that either. But without a continued IDF presence in the cities it conquered, Hamas returned to the sites of its defeat. It reconstituted itself, both physically and spiritually. Sinwar had developed a new sense of his own resilience, American intelligence came to believe, and a suspicion that he might just survive.
March 5
Every time Antony Blinken visited Israel, he found himself in endless meetings with politicians who delivered posturing soliloquies, which reporters who hadn’t been in the room somehow managed to quote later in the day. He began arranging private conversations with Benny Gantz and Yoav Gallant.
Gantz, a former IDF chief of staff turned leader of the centrist opposition, was the great hope for a politically viable alternative to Netanyahu. And in the late winter, he privately indicated to the State Department that the premiership might be within his reach.
The administration thought it could see a path to provoking a political crisis within Israel: Present the Saudi deal to the Israeli public, and if Netanyahu rejected it, Biden could explain its wisdom. Voters would be left to choose between Netanyahu and a sunnier alternative vision of Israel’s future.
To boost his standing, Gantz scheduled a trip to the White House. The visit deeply irked Netanyahu. The Israeli embassy was instructed not to arrange meetings on Gantz’s behalf while he was in Washington.
Two of Blinken’s top deputies, Barbara Leaf and Derek Chollet, met Gantz in his suite at the Willard hotel. It was the former general’s first trip outside Israel since October 7, his first time emerging into a world that had largely shifted its sympathy from Israeli hostages to Palestinian children. As Gantz sipped his coffee, Chollet and Leaf took turns excoriating him for the humanitarian crisis in Gaza. It wasn’t hard to read the surprise on his face; he wasn’t prepared for how differently Americans had come to see the war.
Upon returning to Israel, Gantz told colleagues that Netanyahu was endangering Jerusalem’s relationship with Washington. The warning was both accurate and self-serving; the time had arrived for Gantz to make his move.
But Gantz, ever the Boy Scout, hesitated to resign from the government in the middle of a war or to call for new elections, as he had long hinted he would. His hour had come, and then it swiftly passed him by.
Benny Gantz visits the U.S. State Department on March 5 to discuss humanitarian aid in Gaza. (Chuck Kennedy / State Department / abacapress.com / Reuters)
March 9
Biden was feeling hoodwinked. First, the Israelis had said the war would be over by Christmas; then they’d said it would be over by February. Now they said they wanted to invade Rafah, which would extend the war for several more months.
It seemed to the White House as if the Israelis had learned nothing. They planned to encircle Rafah, the last intact city in Gaza, where refugees from across the Strip had gathered, and then clear it block by block. They had no serious plan for evacuating and rehousing civilians.
In one meeting with Blinken, Ron Dermer boasted that the Israelis had ordered 80,000 tents for evacuees. But in the course of the meeting, the Israelis admitted that the number was actually closer to 40,000. Even the larger number, though, wouldn’t come close to housing more than 1 million refugees.
Biden’s team understood why the Israelis wanted to enter Rafah, which bordered Egypt. Every tunnel resupplying Hamas with smuggled bullets and rockets ran beneath it. The IDF had left it out of the initial plan because its leaders expected to sustain a large number of casualties just tackling their original targets. But as the war had gone on and they’d learned how to fight Hamas, their confidence had grown and their plans had evolved.
Five months into the fighting, Biden and his administration were still reacting to events as they unfolded, and appeared no closer to bringing the conflict to an end. Now, for the first time, he told the Israelis he’d had enough. He couldn’t support an invasion of Rafah without a better plan for limiting Palestinian suffering. In an interview with MSNBC’s Jonathan Capehart, he said that this was his “red line.”
Palestinians rush trucks transporting international aid from the U.S.-built temporary aid pier near the Nuseirat refugee camp in central Gaza on May 18. (AFP / Getty)
III.
David’s Sling
April 1
At about 11 a.m., a group of Israeli officials piled into the White House Situation Room. Jake Sullivan had prepared a lacerating speech: “You’re about to be responsible for the third famine of the 21st century.” But before he could even sit down, Sullivan noticed that the face of the usually gregarious Hadai Zilberman, the military attaché from the Israeli embassy, was creased with worry. He stepped out of the room to talk with Zilberman and Ambassador Herzog.
The Israelis explained that they had just struck a building in Damascus. That, in itself, was not a big deal. As far as the U.S. was concerned, Israel had freedom of action in Syria.
But Herzog and Zilberman intimated that this situation was different. For starters, they had killed three generals and four officers in Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. That included Mohammad Reza Zahedi, the general in charge of Iran’s covert activity in Lebanon and Syria and an old friend of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. And there was a complicating wrinkle: The building abutted the Iranian embassy.
“You did what?” Sullivan asked in disbelief. “Was it part of the embassy?”
The Israelis said they couldn’t be sure, but they didn’t believe that it was.
On social media, however, the Iranians were already claiming that Israel had destroyed its consulate, which constituted sovereign Iranian soil.
Sullivan felt his frustration rising: Does Israel really need this right now? Does the United States really need this right now?
In truth, the Israelis hadn’t fully considered the reverberations, although the Mossad had argued that the strike wasn’t worth the risk. That evening, Iran sent the U.S. a message via the Swiss, holding it responsible and hinting that retaliation would extend to American targets.
Later in the week, the administration sent its own muscular message: Don’t attack Israel. A strike on Israel would draw the region into war; it would draw the U.S. and Iran into conflict.
April 12
Iranian retaliation was often theatrical, severe enough to demonstrate resolve to the regime’s hard-liners but mild enough to preclude a cycle of escalation. But this time, the intel suggested something worse.
At first, the three-letter agencies had predicted that Iran would hurl about a dozen ballistic missiles at Israel. Over the course of a week, however, those predictions had swelled to as many as 50. The number suggested an effort to draw not attention, but blood.
General Kurilla had flown across the region, coordinating an international response to the impending assault. Missiles would be tracked from space and shot down by American ships. The Israelis would use their layered interceptors: the Arrow systems, Iron Dome, David’s Sling. American and British fighter jets would knock down drones before they could enter Israel, which meant operating in Jordanian and Saudi airspace. Kurilla even convinced Arab states that their air forces should participate in knocking down drones, proof of concept for an emerging anti-Iranian alliance.
Lloyd Austin reported that the allies were prepared, but the Pentagon worried that some missiles and drones would slip past the patchwork defense. It seemed almost inevitable that Israel would respond in turn, and that the wider war the administration had worked so hard to avoid would be on.
April 13
“It’s already under way,” Austin told the room.
At about 5:15 p.m., Biden had gathered his advisers in the Situation Room—his intelligence chiefs, his national security adviser, the secretaries of state and defense. The vice president joined remotely, via videophone, as did General Kurilla, who was in Jordan.
The Iranians had unleashed their first salvo, an armada of drones flying slowly toward Israel. This was just the prelude, but Austin was already rushing to tamp down the next phase of the conflict. He had called Yoav Gallant and urged him in the strongest terms not to retaliate without consulting the U.S.
Kurilla periodically disappeared from the screen in search of the latest intelligence. The U.S., the U.K., and their Arab allies had already begun swatting down the drones, he reported. Saudi Arabia, home to Islam’s most sacred sites, was helping defend the Jewish state. (Saudi Arabia has not confirmed or denied its involvement.)
But drones were slow and easy pickings. The bigger tests, Kurilla warned, were the ballistic missiles. He estimated that they could be in the air within the hour.
“What are the primary targets?” the president asked.
The bulk of the missiles were expected to fall on an air base in Israel’s Negev desert, but cities might also be struck. The Houthis, Iran’s proxies in Yemen, might target the resort city of Eilat. Iraqi and Syrian militias might take aim at Haifa. “The numbers are the problem,” Austin said. “They are trying to overwhelm air defense.”
Biden, as always, worried about escalation. “I want to make sure we know what the hell we’re doing,” he said. “It’s one thing to defend Israel. It’s another thing to use force against Iran.”
He was uncertain how ferociously the Israelis might react, but he was sure that they would. “If they don’t respond, I’ll eat this table,” he said.
Then, at 6:34, Kurilla told the room that the full Iranian assault had begun. Screens filled with images of missiles launching. Maps of the Middle East were covered in arcing red lines, tracing the trajectory of lethal projectiles that would land in 12 minutes.
At 6:52, Kurilla appeared again, and said that at least four drones or ballistic missiles had struck their intended target at the Nevatim air base, but he didn’t know the damage. Other drones and missiles were still in the air, and he was unsure if more would follow.
The officials at the table began to retreat from the room to call their own sources, in search of greater clarity. The meeting anxiously dissolved, without any sense of the scale of the crisis.
At 8:07, it reconvened. Austin had just spoken with Gallant. Five of the Iranian missiles hit the air base, he said. Only one struck an occupied building, but it inflicted minimal damage. There was one report of a civilian killed by shrapnel. (It turned out to be false.)
“This is extraordinary,” Austin said, beaming.
It was one thing to design an air defense system, integrating land, sea, and space, and stitching together Arabs, Jews, and Americans. It was another for that system to work nearly perfectly in the heat of battle.
But Sullivan broke the ebullient mood: “I just spoke to my counterpart; there are many voices in the war cabinet that are strongly urging for striking back very quickly.”
Biden picked up the phone to call Netanyahu. He wanted the prime minister to know that Israel had already miscalculated once, by attacking the Iranian facility in Damascus. It couldn’t afford to miscalculate again.
“Tell people that you succeeded. Tell them that you’ve got friends. Tell them that you have a superior military. But if you go after Iran, we’re not going to be with you. Not a joke.”
“I understand, Joe,” Netanyahu responded, “but these guys still have a lot of capability left, and they could do it again.”
After he hung up, Biden told the room that although he’d instructed Netanyahu to “take the win,” he knew he wouldn’t. Biden’s goal wasn’t to prevent Israeli retaliation, but to limit it. He went to bed still unsure whether he had headed off a regional war.
Israel’s war cabinet discusses an attack launched by Iran in Tel Aviv on April 14. (Israeli Government Press Office / Getty)
April 18
In the days that followed, the Israeli war cabinet debated the form that retaliation would take. Sullivan feared that the Israelis wanted to put on a “firework show,” calibrated to project superiority and provoking an endless exchange of missiles.
Sullivan kept calling Israeli officials, and he found that they understood the risks of escalation.
Gallant told him that Israel would engage in a precision response, without announcing the target of the strike or the damage it exacted, so that Iran could save face.
On the evening of April 18, Sullivan and Brett McGurk watched from the Situation Room as Israel struck an air base outside Isfahan, not far from an Iranian nuclear site. It wasn’t the scale of the attack that impressed, but its stealth. Eluding Iran’s air defenses implied that Israel could strike Iran anywhere it wanted, at any time it desired.
But McGurk and Sullivan couldn’t be sure whether the restraint that Israel displayed would preclude escalation. That night, the intelligence showed that Amir Ali Hajizadeh, the Iranian commander who’d overseen the April 13 attack, was aching to fire more missiles at Israel. His view, ultimately, was the dissident one. Iranian media portrayed Israel’s retaliation as ineffectual, hardly worthy of a response. The next day, the Iranians passed yet another message along to the U.S., this time through the United Nations envoy in Lebanon. They were done.
IV.
Breaking Up
Blinken walks with Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant toward the Gaza border at the Kerem Shalom crossing on May 1. (Evelyn Hockstein / AFP / Getty)
May 1
Antony Blinken was headed back to Washington after an exhausting set of meetings. Even at home, he couldn’t escape the conflict. In front of his suburban-Virginia house, protesters had erected an encampment, which they called Kibbutz Blinken, implying that he held dual loyalties. Blinken was the highest-ranking Jew in the executive branch—and the only member of the administration subjected to such treatment. Protesters threw red paint at cars that were leaving his house. They shouted at his wife, “Leave him, leave him.”
When things seemed especially bleak, Blinken liked to quote an aphorism coined by George Mitchell, who negotiated the Good Friday Agreement in 1998, ending decades of sectarian strife in Northern Ireland. While pursuing the deal, Mitchell said, he’d had 700 days of failure and one day of success.
Blinken was at the end of one not particularly successful day. In Jerusalem, he’d confronted Netanyahu and his cabinet about Israel’s plans for invading Rafah.
He told them: You’re going to have to make your own decisions, but go into this clear-eyed; understand the consequences for our relationship.
Netanyahu seemed braced for a possible rupture: If this is it, this is it. If this is where we end, this is where we end. You have to do what you have to do. We have to do what we have to do.
That wasn’t the response the Americans in the room had expected, and it left them dazed. For the entirety of the war, they had avoided a rift in the alliance, but perhaps the alliance was dissolving, despite Biden’s warm feelings, despite all the political costs he’d absorbed on Israel’s behalf.
May 8
Biden told aides that he didn’t want to see Israel raze Rafah, where the IDF was already operating, with the same American bombs that had flattened northern Gaza, so he ordered the suspension of the shipment of certain heavy munitions. But this was an impulsive decision—rendered in anger after Netanyahu crossed Biden’s Rafah red line. The administration hadn’t figured out how to communicate the decision to the Israeli government, but the Israelis were bound to notice that the weapons shipments had been delayed.
Yoav Gallant learned about it from underlings, then confronted Blinken to confirm it. Reports of the slowdown leaked to the press. But instead of discouraging Netanyahu, Biden’s rash move had thrown him a political lifeline.
Over the course of his career, Netanyahu had always excelled at picking fights with Democratic presidents as a means of boosting his standing with right-wing Israeli voters. Now Biden had given him the pretext for the same comfortably familiar play once more.
Netanyahu began to publicly argue that Biden’s caution, his hand-wringing about civilian casualties, was preventing Israel from winning the war. Republican members of Congress were leveling the same accusation, only without any pretense of diplomatic niceties. Senator Tom Cotton told Face the Nation, “Joe Biden’s position is de facto for Hamas victory at this point.”
May 31
After months of drift, Biden was at last aggressively attempting to impose his will and bring the fighting in Gaza to a close. In the State Dining Room of the White House, he delivered a speech—and presented a four-and-a-half-page plan—describing the mechanics of a cease-fire, distilling months of negotiation between Israel and Hamas. Only this time, the proposed deal wasn’t being hashed out behind the scenes between the parties, but issued from the mouth of the president of the United States.
Biden intended to stuff Netanyahu in a box by insisting publicly that Israel had agreed to his proposal—even though he knew that the right-wing members of the Israeli government would likely reject it, and that Netanyahu had made a habit of pushing for better terms even after he’d committed to a deal. But with its invasion of Rafah advancing, and as it gained control of the smuggling tunnels in the south, Israel was on the brink of ending the most intensive phase of the war.
The president described Hamas as the key obstacle to the deal, and he directed his administration to use every means at its disposal to pressure the group. After Biden’s speech, Blinken called MBAR, Qatar’s prime minister, and told him that he needed to evict Hamas from his country if it rejected the cease-fire. Before Blinken hung up the phone, MBAR agreed.
By now, it had been 237 days since Hamas had kidnapped some 250 hostages. And by the IDF’s count, it still held about 100 alive, and the bodies of at least 39 others. Striking a deal offered the best chance of bringing them home, and Biden was finally investing the prestige of the presidency to make it happen.
August 1
Throngs crammed the streets of Tehran, accompanying a casket carrying the body of Ismail Haniyeh, the head of Hamas’s political wing and its chief negotiator in the cease-fire talks. A remotely detonated bomb had exploded at the guesthouse where he was staying for the inauguration of Iran’s new president.
Israel declined to publicly assume responsibility, but in a message to the State Department, it bluntly owned the assassination and blamed Haniyeh for a long list of horrific acts. Although the Israelis had given no specific warning, they had previously told the Americans of their intent to eliminate the upper echelon of Hamas’s October 7 leadership; with Haniyeh gone, only two remained.
As Blinken absorbed the news on a trip to Asia, he called MBAR. “It was shocking because he was the one that was mainly overcoming the obstacles to get into a deal,” the Qatari prime minister complained.
But American officials weren’t overly concerned about the negotiations. Hamas, they judged, would replace Haniyeh and continue to negotiate, just as Haniyeh had continued to negotiate after Israel killed three of his 13 sons and four grandchildren.
What worried them more was that Haniyeh’s death was just one of several attacks by the Israelis. Hours before, an air strike had killed Fuad Shukr, a top Hezbollah commander, in retaliation for a rocket that killed 12 children playing on a soccer pitch in the Golan Heights. About a week before that, Israel had struck the Houthis in Yemen, avenging a drone attack on Tel Aviv.
After Haniyeh’s death, Iran threatened to reprise its April attack on Israel. In response, the United States began following the same well-trodden steps, moving a carrier and a submarine into the region, and sending stern warnings to Tehran through back channels. Officials began mobilizing the allies. This time, though, other countries were hesitant to come to Israel’s defense. The Saudis and Jordanians worried that by protecting Israel, the U.S. was giving it license to launch ever more perilous attacks in the region. Although they eventually joined the preparations for defending against an assault, the administration began to worry that these repeated trips to the brink were exhausting its luck.
August 21
When President Biden had presented his outline for a cease-fire in May, Netanyahu’s advisers had signaled that he endorsed it. But in late July, Israeli negotiators sent a letter backing away. To agree to the deal, Israel said that it needed five new amendments, including stationing Israeli troops on Gaza’s southern border, along the Philadelphi corridor.
The administration felt as if Netanyahu was scuppering a deal just as one seemed plausible. It leaked the Israeli letter to The New York Times in frustration, as evidence of the prime minister’s bad faith.
But Biden thought he needed to bring Netanyahu back in line himself. On the phone, he implored him to compromise, implying that he would pin blame for any collapse of the talks on the prime minister.
The burst of presidential pressure was hardly unexpected—and Netanyahu was clearly prepared for it. Worried that he might be portrayed as the saboteur who prevented the return of the hostages, he told Biden that he would dial back his demands. His counterproposal didn’t diverge much from the deal that the administration had judged that Hamas would accept.
For a time in August, Hamas was an equally frustrating barrier to progress, as it waited for Iran to avenge Haniyeh’s death. But as time passed without a counterstrike, the administration began to believe that Iran, like Netanyahu, didn’t want to be accused of ruining a deal. Hamas’s tone shifted, suggesting a willingness to negotiate.
A cease-fire, and the release of hostages, seemed closer than ever.
August 31
Jake Sullivan decamped to New Hampshire for Labor Day weekend, so that he could be with his wife, Maggie, who was running in a Democratic primary for Congress. That Saturday, he received a call from William Burns, reporting that the IDF had found six corpses in a tunnel beneath Rafah. The Israelis couldn’t yet confirm it, but they were convinced that the bodies were those of hostages, murdered execution-style, and that Hersh Goldberg-Polin was among them.
Over the past 11 months, Sullivan had met regularly with the families of the American hostages held by Hamas, often in a group. But he also spoke separately with Hersh’s mother, Rachel, with whom he felt a particular connection. Through their conversations, Sullivan had formed a mental portrait of her 23-year-old son, a dual U.S. and Israeli citizen—a single human face for Sullivan’s broader effort to reunite the hostages with their families.
Day after day, he had worked to save Hersh’s life. I’ve failed, he thought to himself. I’ve objectively failed.
[Read: Hamas’s devastating murder of Hersh Goldberg-Polin]
At 8 o’clock that evening, Sullivan dialed into a secure call with Biden, Finer, Blinken, and McGurk. Phil Gordon joined on the vice president’s behalf. As a group, they reviewed the past 11 months. Could they have done anything differently? Had they overlooked any opportunities for securing the release of the hostages?
Sullivan wondered if a deal had ever been possible. Hamas had just killed six of its best bargaining chips, an act of nihilism.
Over the course of two hours, the group batted ideas back and forth. In the end, they threw up their hands. There was no magical act of diplomacy, no brilliant flourish of creative statecraft that they could suddenly deploy.
After all the trips to the region, all the suffering witnessed on those trips, all the tough conversations, all the cease-fire proposals, the conflict raged on. Three hundred thirty-one days of failure, and the single day of success was still beyond their grasp.
* Illustration sources: Chip Somodevilla / Getty; Jacquelyn Martin / AFP / Getty; Menahem Kahana / AFP / Getty; Abed Rahim Khatib / Anadolu / Getty; Said Khatib / AFP / Getty; Jalaa Marey / AFP / Getty; Bashar Taleb / AFP / Getty; Khames Alrefi / Middle East Images / AFP / Getty; Said Khatib / AFP / Getty; Ali Jadallah / Anadolu / Getty; Alexi Rosenfeld / Getty