When writing a tick-tock, behind-the-scenes essay on a just-concluded current event, you cannot forget that you already know how it ends.

That’s the mistake Franklin Foer makes in his long Atlantic piece on the Biden administration’s year of failure when it comes to producing peace in Gaza. The article is a credulous recounting of Biden-Bibi tensions entirely from the National Security Council’s perspective without the benefit of hindsight. Foer ends his opus with national security advisor Jake Sullivan beginning to suspect that Hamas has been playing him this whole time; it would seem, rather, that Foer himself was coming to that conclusion about Sullivan and his efforts to spin Foer.

Both are true.

The worst part is not that the piece is one-sided. It’s that Foer allowed himself to be a mouthpiece for a particularly nasty set of cheap shots aimed by the administration at the Israelis—regarding the hostages, no less—that we already know are not just petulant but plain false.

It begins with an attempt to set the table and the narrative: Biden was pursuing a normalization deal between Israel and Saudi Arabia that would also have involved American concessions to Riyadh. Hamas blew up the deal with its Oct. 7 attacks, and Biden gave Benjamin Netanyahu a bear hug that, it turns out, was not quite the expression of solidarity with Israel’s cause than it seemed to be at the time.

One can pinpoint the moment the administration started singing a different tune behind closed doors. Before Israel’s incursion into Gaza in late October, Secretary of State Antony Blinken was meeting with the emir of Qatar, Hamas’s feckless and reckless patron. The emir told Blinken that Hamas was practically desperate to give back some of the hostages it had taken because the kidnappings had been too successful and Hamas couldn’t manage all of them. (Later we are told Hamasniks wanted to at least give back the babies so they didn’t have to change diapers, a reminder of the limitless, demonic evil of the men whose word the Qatari emir was taking at face value.)

Now, one might interject right here and say plainly: No one was forcing Hamas to hold any hostages. But Foer’s sources ignore that fact and suggest that Hamas got stuck with the hostages because Israel wouldn’t take them. Foer inexplicably and repulsively repeats this libel as if it could possibly be true—as if the Israelis were the monsters in this scenario.

Foer writes that “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.”

I want to pause here and fast-forward to the end of the essay to remind readers of what Foer already knew when he wrote those sentences. “Sullivan wondered if a deal had ever been possible,” Foer writes in the essay’s coda after IDF soldiers have recovered the bodies of six hostages, including a high-profile American. “Hamas had just killed six of its best bargaining chips, an act of nihilism.”

This moment took place ten months after the period in which Foer claims the Israelis thought they could simply pass up a hostage deal and magically rescue 250 people in the goblins’ dungeons under Gaza.

We know now that’s not what happened at all. Hamas wanted to drag out negotiations over hostages before Israeli troops entered Gaza. That way, Yahya Sinwar believed, the invasion might not just be forestalled but avoided completely. Sinwar wanted Israel to flinch and for Biden to step in between the two of them, making an eventual full-scale mission in Gaza close to impossible. Before the ground invasion commenced, the New York Times tells us, “Hamas refused to provide any proof of life about the hostages. Negotiations stalled.” Hamas was bluffing.

What else do we know now? That Hamas wouldn’t actually trade the babies whose diapers it supposedly wanted to avoid changing. We know that, because the youngest hostages taken on Oct. 7 have never returned. Perhaps one day they will, but the likeliest explanation is that Hamas did to inconvenient Jewish babies what the Nazis did to such infants.

Has Foer ever come across another person who would kill a baby to avoid changing its diaper but otherwise is an honest and reliable person whose word you could take to the bank? Has Sullivan? Has Blinken? Have these people lost their minds? Or is it their souls they’ve lost?

Truth be told, we don’t have to fast-forward all the way to the end of the story to know this part is hogwash. Three weeks after Israeli troops entered Gaza, the two sides struck the very hostage deal the Israelis were supposedly avoiding, complete with a “pause” in the fighting.

How did that happen? Well, Biden’s negotiating team had been focused more on getting a ceasefire than on the hostage aspect of the deal. As the Times noted, Biden realized he wouldn’t get the ceasefire without ensuring the release of the hostages too. The ceasefire was Biden’s prize, and he’d only get it because Israeli ground troops had pushed Hamas’s back against a wall. When the IDF surrounded al Shifa hospital in Gaza City, which Hamas had taken over to hoard supplies, hold prisoners, and host commanders’ strategy sessions, Sinwar became increasingly willing to strike that deal.

The idea that “the Americans worried about hostages dying in captivity” but the Israelis didn’t is a monstrous, despicable, evil lie—and contemporaneous reporting proves the Americans knew it was a lie ten months ago. Yet here it is, presented to readers as if a revelation.

It is not a revelation. It is a rank falsehood and a disgrace.