When Hamas led the Oct. 7, 2023, raids into Israel, killing about 1,200 people, about 250 people were taken into Gaza as hostages, including citizens of Israel, the United States, Britain, Mexico, Thailand and other countries.

Among the captives were the bodies of 37 people killed in the attack, Israeli officials said. Now, about 100 hostages, living and dead, are still being held in the enclave, officials say.

The cease-fire deal announced on Wednesday between Israel and Hamas would begin with an initial phase lasting six weeks, and involve the release of 33 hostages and hundreds of Palestinian prisoners. The agreement requires Hamas to release three female hostages on Day 1, four more on Day 7 and 26 more over the next five weeks, according to a copy of the document obtained by The New York Times. The deal still has to be formally ratified by Israel’s cabinet.

Here’s a closer look at the hostage situation in Gaza.

How many hostages have already been released?

Early in the war, Hamas released four hostages — two Israeli-American women, Judith Raanan, then 59, and her daughter, Natalie Raanan, then 17, and two Israeli women, Nurit Cooper, then 79, and Yocheved Lifshitz, then 85, citing humanitarian reasons. More than 100 hostages were freed in November 2023 during a staggered truce between Israel and Hamas. In exchange, about 240 Palestinians held in Israel were released.

How many hostages have been rescued?

Eight hostages have been freed in Israeli military operations, including one in the first month of the war, when the military rescued one soldier, Pvt. Ori Megidish, then 19, who had been abducted from her base.

In February 2024, a military operation in the southern Gazan city of Rafah freed two hostages: Fernando Simon Marman, then 60, and Louis Har, then 70.

In June, the Israeli military freed four people kidnapped from the Nova music festival on Oct. 7, 2023: Noa Argamani, then 26; Almog Meir Jan, then 22; Andrey Kozlov, then 27; and Shlomi Ziv, then 41. Ms. Argamani’s case received outsize attention after viral footage showed her being taken into Gaza on the back of a motorcycle as she cried out in desperation.

About 100 Palestinians were killed during the operation, according to the Israeli authorities, but officials in Gaza put the death toll at more than 270, including 64 children. (Neither toll distinguished between civilians and combatants.)

In August, the Israeli military rescued Farhan al-Qadi, then 52, a member of Israel’s Bedouin Arab minority, in an operation that killed at least 20 Gazans, local authorities said.

How many hostages have died?

Of the 250 hostages, about three dozen were presumed dead early in the war, according to the Israeli authorities.

Some of their bodies have since been found in Gaza and repatriated, while other captives initially believed to be alive were subsequently declared killed.

The discoveries have raised questions about the extent to which intense Israeli military operations targeting Hamas have also endangered the captives.

The Israeli military has killed several hostages in error. In December 2023, the military said its soldiers had mistakenly shot and killed three hostages who fled their captors in Gaza: Yotam Haim, 28, and Alon Shamriz, 26, who were taken from Kibbutz Kfar Aza; and Samer Talalka, 24, who was kidnapped from Kibbutz Nir Am while at work.

Last July, Israel’s military retrieved the bodies of five hostages — two soldiers and three civilians, ages 20 to 56. They were found in a tunnel shaft in southern Gaza.

Israeli officials said the captives were killed during the October 2023 attack and their bodies taken as bargaining chips. The next month, Israeli forces said they had recovered the bodies of six hostages in a Gaza tunnel.

In September, the Israeli military recovered the bodies of another six hostages, ages 23 to 40, who it said had been killed in captivity. Among them was Hersh Goldberg-Polin, an Israeli-American whose parents spoke at the Democratic National Convention in August.

In March, the family of Itay Chen — a 19-year-old American born in Israel who was serving in the Israeli military — said it had learned he was killed on Oct. 7, 2023.

In December, the family of Omer Neutra, 21, an Israeli-American serving in the Israeli military, said it had learned he, too, was killed that October. His parents spoke at the Republican National Convention in July.

This month, the Israeli military said Youssef and Hamza Ziyadne were dead. Youssef Ziyadne, 53, was taken hostage from a kibbutz with three of his children, including his 23-year-old son Hamza and two teenagers, Bilal and Aisha, who were freed during the truce in November 2023. The family is part of Israel’s Bedouin Arab minority.

How many hostages are Americans?

Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken, in a speech on Tuesday, said seven Americans were still being held captive.

Edan Alexander and Sagui Dekel-Chen were believed to be alive as of December, according to the American Jewish Committee.

A few of the remaining five were declared dead early in the war. Their bodies remain in Gaza.

After Donald J. Trump’s presidential inauguration on Monday, Canadians will learn whether he intends to follow through on his threat to immediately impose 25 percent tariffs on exports from Canada to the United States.

Many people here have told me they are looking forward to the details of the federal government’s response to any American trade action. Matina Stevis-Gridneff, our Canada bureau chief, reports that it will be much like Canada’s response to the tariffs on aluminum and steel that Mr. Trump introduced during his first administration. Any coming retaliatory tariffs, she writes, will “focus on goods made in Republican or swing states, where the pain of tariffs, like pressure on jobs and the bottom lines of local businesses, would affect Trump allies.”

[Read: Canada’s Plan for a Trade War: Pain for Red States and Trump Allies]

But given the size of Canada’s economy, the country cannot inflict the same amount of harm that the United States can. That raises the question of whether retaliation, no matter how politically targeted, will be effective.

There is, of course, no way to answer that question. But an earlier trade war between Canada and the United States might offer some indications of what’s to come.

Back in 1930, as today, the North American neighbors were each other’s largest trading partner. But the mix of goods was quite different: For one thing, Canada was importing most of its oil from the United States, while today oil and gas are Canada’s largest exports.

A movement by American farmers to close off competition from imports, including those from Canada, to bolster prices ballooned into a sweeping piece of legislation known as the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act. It raised already high U.S. tariffs, eventually bringing the average import duty to a staggering 59.1 percent.

Then as now, the tariffs were denounced by many economists. Over 1,000 of them unsuccessfully petitioned President Herbert Hoover to veto the bill.

Historians and economists still debate the effect of Smoot-Hawley on the Great Depression. But a 1997 paper by three economists at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania documents how it harmed Canada’s economy and profoundly influenced its politics.

Most of the seven largest exports from Canada to the United States at the time, the paper says, had large declines. Exports of milk and cheese plunged by 65 percent, and cattle sales to the United States fell by 84 percent.

Before Smoot-Hawley, William Lyon Mackenzie King, the Liberal prime minister, had been planning to reduce tariffs on Canadian imports of U.S. goods. In the hope of avoiding a trade war, Mackenzie King matched the new U.S. tariffs on only 16 products, which accounted for 30 percent of imports from the United States.

Like Prime Minister Justin Trudeau today, Mackenzie King led a minority government. He passed bills with the support of the Progressives, a party supported largely by farmers.

During the 1930 election campaign, R.B. Bennett, the Conservative leader, relentlessly attacked Mackenzie King for not retaliating more forcefully against the United States.

Bennett’s speeches about the merits of high tariffs were remarkably similar to Mr. Trump’s social media posts on the topic today.

“How many tens of thousands of American workmen are living on Canadian money today?” he said while campaigning in Quebec. “They’ve got the jobs, and we’ve got the soup kitchens.”

He promised the crowd that he would use tariffs to “blast a way into markets that have been closed.”

A vote analysis in the Lehigh paper concludes that tariff issues were a key factor in Bennett’s victory in the 1930 election, which brought the Conservatives their only majority government between 1911 and 1958.

While Bennett did increase tariffs, they failed to blast a way into any market, according to Robert Bothwell, an emeritus professor of Canadian history at the University of Toronto.

But, Professor Bothwell told me, Bennett found another solution, which involved expanding on one of Mackenzie King’s actions: When he imposed the tariffs on U.S. goods, Mackenzie King also cut them on 270 products from Britain and other countries within its empire.

Bennett hosted a conference in Ottawa that led to a series of agreements between Britain and its former colonies that greatly opened up trade between them by reducing and in some cases eliminating tariffs.

That arrangement, Professor Bothwell said, could neither offset the economic collapse of the Depression nor fully replace the American market for Canadian exports, but it did greatly mitigate the harm caused by Smoot-Hawley.

“We had an out of sorts, and it really did work in the ’30s,” he said. “Every time the Americans jacked up their tariffs, we would tend to trade more with the British.”

When Franklin D. Roosevelt succeeded Hoover as U.S. president in 1933, Professor Bothwell said, his administration soon noticed the loss of exports to Canada, driven by the combination of American tariffs and the Imperial arrangement with Britain, and moved to compromise on trade.

Today there is talk that Canada will again try to build up exports with nations other than the United States. But Professor Bothwell said that changes in trade, manufacturing and transportation have made a repeat unlikely.

“We don’t have an obvious alternative,” he said. “I don’t see us having a way to absorb the same amount of exports as we did in the ’30s.”

• Mark Carney, former governor of the Canadian and British central banks, and Chrystia Freeland, the former deputy prime minister, have both officially announced their campaigns to succeed Prime Minister Justin Trudeau as the Liberal Party leader.

• With the Buffalo Bills and the Detroit Lions both Super Bowl contenders, N.F.L. fans in Canada have two border city teams to cheer for.

• Canada is sending air tankers and dozens of its battle-tested wildland firefighters to Los Angeles.

• Home security-camera footage shows a puff of smoke, along with the sound of an explosion, as a meteorite lands in Charlottetown.

• In a lawsuit, Drake accused his own record label, Universal Music Group, of putting his life and his reputation at risk by releasing and promoting a popular diss track by his musical rival Kendrick Lamar.

• In Opinion, the Times columnist Ross Douthat makes the case for Canada’s joining the United States. Two readers respond with letters declining the invitation.

Ian Austen reports on Canada for The Times based in Ottawa. He covers politics, culture and the people of Canada and has reported on the country for two decades. He can be reached at austen@nytimes.com. More about Ian Austen

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Making his final trip as America’s top diplomat last week, Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken arrived in Paris, his former hometown, to a hero’s welcome.

France’s president, Emmanuel Macron, proclaimed Mr. Blinken “an eminent servant of peace” at a ceremony at the Élysée Palace before awarding him the country’s highest tribute, the Legion of Honor medal. With its red silk ribbon pinned to his jacket, Mr. Blinken called the medal “the honor of a lifetime.”

It was a very different scene back in Washington a few days later, when Mr. Blinken gave a final speech before a crowd of foreign policy experts.

“Secretary Blinken! Your legacy will be genocide! You will forever be known as ‘Bloody Blinken, Secretary of Genocide,’” shouted a protester who had infiltrated the Atlantic Council event. Security officers led her out of the room, as well as a man waving a sign that read “Blinken: War Criminal.”

A similar drama punctured Mr. Blinken’s farewell news conference at the State Department two days later, as a journalist, shouting that Mr. Blinken belonged in The Hague, was carried from the room by security officers.

The contrasting scenes reveal the duality of Mr. Blinken’s tenure as secretary of state. Over four years and more than one million flight miles logged, Mr. Blinken was the face of America’s deep involvement in two wars, one in Ukraine and the other in Israel and Gaza. The first, the defense of Ukraine against Russia, was a popular cause marked by Ukrainian flags flying from American porches, and it allowed Mr. Blinken to bask in accolades as he invoked the highest principles of international law and human rights.

But the war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza ignited by Palestinian terrorist attacks became a political and moral nightmare for the Biden administration as Israeli strikes with American-supplied weapons killed an estimated 46,000 Palestinians, many of them women and children.

While President Biden set the policy, Mr. Blinken, his decades-long aide and surrogate son, presented it to the public. The diplomat was accused of gutting the very principles he had championed in Ukraine, and became the target of vitriol rarely directed at a U.S. secretary of state.

So entwined is Mr. Blinken’s work and his reputation with conflict that he could just as easily be called by a retired cabinet title that is still on office plaques in the old State Department building — secretary of war.

Mr. Blinken reflected on the question during an interview this week in his wood-paneled office, which he had decorated with contemporary art pieces from the likes of Jasper Johns and Willem de Kooning. Mr. Blinken said, “If we want to use the term ‘war’ expansively, I think the State Department has been” — he paused — “yes, it has taken up a lot of our time and effort, and yes, as part of that, you learn a lot about weapons systems.”

War presented the Biden administration with the opportunity to forge closer international partnerships, and it is there that the president and his aides have excelled, Mr. Blinken said. “The United States is able to engage a more contested, a more complicated, a more combustible world from a position of strength,” he said. “That’s what I believe our legacy is.”

Over a long career as a Washington foreign policy hand, including as deputy secretary of state, Mr. Blinken was no stranger to war, having grappled with the American quagmires in Iraq and Afghanistan. And his childhood was shaped by the memory of World War II, specifically by stories of how his stepfather, Samuel Pisar, survived the Holocaust.

At the ceremony in Paris, Mr. Blinken cited a lesson he learned from his stepfather: “We have to remain eternally vigilant, because humanity’s striving for the best can sometimes be overcome by its capacity for the worst.”

But the world served up an especially ugly parade of horrors as Mr. Blinken took charge of the State Department: strife and atrocities in Yemen, Syria, Haiti, Ethiopia, Armenia, Myanmar, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Sudan, where the secretary declared this month that combatants were carrying out a genocide.

Bearing a flawlessly polite and self-effacing demeanor, Mr. Blinken spent countless hours trying to resolve and prevent conflict. But for better or worse, his legacy rests not on forging grand peace treaties — those traditional diplomatic prizes eluded him — but on his role in two wars that often cast him in very different lights.

Drawing the Line Against Russia

Mr. Blinken’s first test, the American withdrawal from Afghanistan, was widely seen as a fiasco.

The Taliban’s swift takeover of Kabul caught the State Department by surprise, forcing a chaotic evacuation of American citizens and Afghan allies. Some Republican lawmakers demanded that Mr. Blinken resign.

His moment came when President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia ordered a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

Visiting Berlin a month before the assault, Mr. Blinken delivered a speech invoking the way Presidents John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan had stood up to Soviet power and declared that the United States would again defend “the governing principles of international peace and security.” A day later in Geneva, he faced down his grim Russian counterpart, Sergey Lavrov, warning that a Russian attack would draw “a swift, severe and a united response.”

It was the kind of commanding, high-stakes diplomacy you might see in the Netflix series “The Diplomat.” Mr. Blinken deployed his flawless French in Paris and Brussels, and cajoled leaders in Seoul and Tokyo. The result: a coalition of about 50 nations committed to supplying weapons to Ukraine or imposing economic sanctions on Russia.

As the war progressed, neither side sought negotiations, so Mr. Blinken was less a peacemaker than a war strategist. Immersed in details of military hardware and battlefield conditions, he often argued against more risk-averse Pentagon officials in favor of sending powerful American weapons to Ukraine.

And when the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Mark A. Milley, suggested in late 2022 that Ukraine should capitalize on battlefield gains by seeking peace talks with Moscow, Mr. Blinken insisted the fight should go on.

Visiting Kyiv in May, Mr. Blinken, a guitar player, took the stage at a packed music club and led a local band in a rendition of Neil Young’s “Rockin’ in the Free World.” The defense of Ukraine had offered him a literal rock star moment.

Bombs and Bodies in Gaza

Five days after the terrorist attacks carried out by Hamas in October 2023, Mr. Blinken stood next to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel at a military base in Tel Aviv and told the world how the killings had seared him personally.

“I come before you not only as the U.S. secretary of state, but also as a Jew,” he said. “I understand on a personal level the harrowing echoes that Hamas’s massacres carry for Israeli Jews and for Jews everywhere.”

That moment, too, had a noble glow. Mr. Blinken was rushing to the rescue of an American friend who had been horribly violated in the attacks. Hamas and its partners took hostages and killed more than 1,200 Israelis — the largest single-day massacre of Jews since the Holocaust.

But this time the narrative would grow far more complicated. In private meetings on that same trip, Mr. Blinken and his aides heard about war plans for Gaza that foretold more mass killing — including ominous reminders from Israeli officials that America had once been willing to annihilate Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Mr. Blinken would make a dozen wartime trips to the Middle East. They were grim affairs, in contrast to the European tours where he was hailed as a savior of Ukraine. Israeli officials complained about pressure from Washington on one day while Arab monarchs fumed on the next that Israel was out of control.

Again he immersed himself in military matters. Meeting with Israel’s war cabinet, he would study maps of Gaza and discuss details of its strategy. On one visit, they scrambled into a bunker when Tel Aviv came under rocket attack.

He beseeched the Israelis to let in more humanitarian aid and limit civilian casualties as they pummeled Gaza, turning hospitals, schools and mosques to dust. Some State Department officials argued in vain that Israel was intentionally withholding food and medicine from desperate Palestinians. For months, Mr. Blinken has said the department was “assessing” reports of Israeli war crimes.

Over time, Mr. Blinken’s visits with Mr. Netanyahu seemed to become less and less effective. Sometimes the Israeli leader would publicly undermine his American guest’s positions hours after hosting him.

Critics of the war said that only withholding military aid would change the Israeli approach. That never happened.

In keeping with Mr. Biden’s “bear hug” approach, Mr. Blinken and the State Department kept sending Israel weapons, including 2,000-pound bombs that U.S. military officials call unsuited for urban combat.

Over the 15 months of war, Mr. Biden has approved $26 billion in aid to Israel. Mr. Blinken has never expressed regrets about not using that leverage. Signs of “daylight” between the United States and Israel only encouraged Hamas, he says.

State Department officials sent Mr. Blinken dissent cables opposing the policy. A handful resigned and became public dissidents.

“We don’t have a policy,” said Michael Casey, a diplomat and Iraq war veteran who resigned last year from his State Department post in Jerusalem, where he worked on Gaza. “We support the Israeli government’s goals over our own interests.”

He said that “of everyone in the cast of characters at the top, Antony Blinken has been the most disappointing.” Despite showing flashes of empathy with Palestinians, he said, Mr. Blinken never veered from the approach to Israel.

Protesters camped outside his Virginia home and splashed fake blood on his black Suburban. The descendant of a Holocaust survivor was accused of enabling “genocide.”

Such invective “comes with the job,” Mr. Blinken said while warning that a trend of hounding public officials in private spaces like their homes could deter people from entering government.

For a time it seemed that he might have nothing to show for his many months pressing to achieve a Gaza cease-fire deal. Then came this week’s agreement between Israel and Hamas.

Even if it took pressure from President-elect Donald J. Trump, the deal, if it holds, could be a welcome part of Mr. Blinken’s legacy. But the clock has run out on his greater ambition of brokering a historic agreement to normalize diplomatic relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia that would, in theory, have included a first-ever explicit pathway to a Palestinian state.

Such a pact might have won him some forgiveness from furious Western liberals and Muslims worldwide.

He admits that public opinion toward the United States has grown “very challenging” in places where America is seen as hypocritical for denouncing Russia’s war while defending Israel’s.

He must also accept a frustrating uncertainty. Ukraine’s fate is now in peril under Mr. Trump. And as for Gaza, some doubt that a cease-fire can endure.

That is the nature of war, Mr. Blinken says: “Most of these challenges don’t have neat Hollywood endings.”

He leaves perhaps haunted by his gazing into the same abyss of humanity that his stepfather survived decades ago. “What really drives me more than anything else is the demonization we see in all directions,” he said. “The inability to acknowledge suffering on each side, the inability to see the humanity in the other.”