The New Yorker:

Ian Crouch
Newsletter editor

Two years ago today, Ruth Margalit reported from Israel, in the first hours following Hamas’s shocking incursion. “It’s still too early—and too devastating—to know the picture that will emerge from this coördinated attack,” she wrote, but already the talk was of war.

Nearly twelve hundred people were killed in Israel during the October 7th attacks, and two hundred and fifty were taken hostage. Israel’s response, a grinding military campaign in Gaza, would raise the cost in human lives to staggering levels: more than sixty-seven thousand Palestinians have been killed so far, with more than a hundred and sixty-nine thousand injured. The military conflict would spill over to Lebanon, Iran, Qatar, and elsewhere. Half a world away, in the United States, political life, as expressed on college campuses, in street protests, and at the ballot box, would be upended and reordered in ways that will reverberate for years to come.

In a new piece from this past weekend, Margalit reports about what appears to be a possible ceasefire agreement. Both Benjamin Netanyahu and the remaining leaders of Hamas, she explains, are facing mounting pressure from their respective allies—and both would be taking risks in accepting a deal. But things are moving quickly. “Change, as the saying goes, happens gradually, then all at once,” she notes.

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