Hamas has released the last twenty living Israeli hostages. What comes next in the ceasefire negotiations is likely to be far more complicated. But, first, decades after a young man’s mysterious death in Australia, Eren Orbey reports on critical new information in the case. Plus:

Scott Johnson was found dead at the base of North Head, a sandstone promontory in Manly, Australia, that looms two hundred feet above the craggy shore of the Tasman Sea. A pair of spear fishermen were walking along the water on a humid morning in December, 1988, when they came upon his body, which was naked and badly disfigured. A storm had swept the coast the night before, washing away most of the blood, but seagulls were picking at bits of innards strewn across the rocks. One of the men left to call for help; the other waited for the police to arrive and hiked with them to the top of the cliff. Thirty feet from the edge, they spotted a neatly folded pile of clothes and a pair of sneakers stuffed with personal effects, including a rail pass. There were no signs of foul play, and there was no suicide note.

Scott was a twenty-seven-year-old American who had been living with his partner, Michael Noone, in the capital city of Canberra, three hours south of Manly. Late that evening, Noone arrived home to find a message on his answering machine from the police. When he called back, he was asked to come identify Scott’s body as soon as possible. Before making the drive to Manly, Noone called Scott’s older brother, Steve, a graduate student who lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with his wife and their newborn. The brothers were close, and Scott had stayed with Steve for six weeks that summer. Steve later recalled, of learning the news, “I can still feel the paralysis of those first quiet moments.”

Steve got on the next flight to Australia. By the time he arrived, the police had deemed Scott’s death a suicide. Steve refused to believe this. “It just didn’t seem possible that he would have killed himself without saying goodbye,” he later said. Scott had been a star academic finishing up a Ph.D. in mathematics. He’d travelled to Sydney regularly to meet with an adviser, who told Steve that they’d made a date for the following week. Yet Steve recalled a constable saying, of North Head, “This is where people go to jump, mate—especially homosexuals,” as if that settled the matter. Steve was dismayed to learn that, although Scott’s wallet hadn’t been found, the cliff top hadn’t been treated as a possible crime scene. The police had moved Scott’s clothes before photographing them, compromising potential evidence, and they hadn’t canvassed the area for witnesses. Steve pressed for a thorough investigation, but a coroner’s inquest, conducted to ascertain the manner of death, concluded that, “in the absence of anything to the contrary of the evidence,” the suicide finding was sound.

Any unexplained death leaves room for competing narratives, but Scott’s death involved a particularly vexing set of ambiguities. It was unclear why he’d been in Manly, a scrappy suburban surf town across Sydney Harbour, and no one could account for how he’d spent the day and a half before he was found. His injuries from the fall were so severe that a medical examiner couldn’t determine whether his body had suffered prior violence. For nearly two decades, Steve lived with questions but didn’t know what to do with them. When his brother’s name came up in conversation, he’d say that Scott had died in a fall or an accident, or by “what the coroner said was suicide, but we’re not sure.”

One morning in 2005, Steve was sorting through mail in his kitchen when he found a manila envelope from Noone. It contained a pair of news clippings from the Sydney Morning Herald concerning three men who’d died or disappeared in the nineteen-eighties along the cliffs of Bondi Beach, a popular tourist site less than an hour from North Head. One article explained that the Bondi headland was a well-known cruising spot, or “beat,” where gangs of teen-agers were known to attack and rob gay men. The cases of the three victims had originally been left unresolved or chalked up to “misadventure.” Now, however, after a new investigation, a coroner had concluded that at least two of the men had likely been thrown to their death from the cliffs. As Steve read and reread the pages, he felt a long-sought sense of certainty: “It’s safe to say that I instantly thought, This is what happened to my brother.”

All twenty living hostages held by Hamas were returned to Israel this morning, reuniting with their families at the Re’im military base, near the Gaza border. And Israel is releasing Palestinian prisoners and detainees in exchange. Both President Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu have depicted the ceasefire deal as a personal win, but the second phase of the agreement—addressing the future of Gaza—has yet to be decided. Ruth Margalit reports »

“Ugh, a ticket to a Jets game?”

Cartoon by Nathan Cooper

P.S. On Indigenous Peoples’ Day, revisit Elizabeth Kolbert on the many mistakes of Christopher Columbus.

Hannah Jocelyn contributed to this edition.