I'm making a story about a hostage crisis. What can I do to make it interesting?

Just play it like die hard
>bad guys take hostages
>make demands as a distractions for time while they break into something for whatever plot device
>bad guys plan to make a massive distraction, killing many of their own hostages while they run away will ill-gotten gains in the confusion

Or have the hostage takers be all mimics and turn it into a game of hide and go seek.

-the hostages are also bad guys, except for one or two. the whole thing is a prescripted flash mob.

-setting is something strange, a train, airship, etc.

-nontraditional hostage taking. poison in the beers of a sports stadium. unless (thing they want) is given in (arbitrary time limit) antidote is not released.

-hostage takers are exceptionally relatable, and their goals align with the partys.

- there are moles in the police department feeding the hostage takers information about actions and placement.

- hostage takers are all suicide bomber levels of committed.

Read the two seperate hostage scenarios in the Unknown Armies book "One Shots", specifically "Fly To Heaven" and "Prison Break"

A third part intervene with mysterious intentions not really clear to anybody

One of the hostages is, completely by random accident, himself a wanted fugitive with no connection to the crime in progress. If he gets released to the police he will be recognized and arrested, so he keeps doing shitty to extend the crises until he can engineer his own secret escape.

>It's a third world country where two major ethnic groups are in constant conflict with eachother and a third party from the first world is trying to keep the situation somewhat stable
>A large group of terrorists (20+) from group A storm a bank in a small city where group B is the ethnic majority and keeps everyone from group B hostage until the First World Power makes concessions favorable to group A
>The bank guards and civillians from group B manage to overpower the terrorists from group A and are now keeping *them* hostage until the First World Power makes concessions favorable to group B
>More terrorists from group A come to the aid of their now-hostage buddies and the entire situation escalates
>First World Power is sitting on its hands, because getting involved would piss off one of those groups but not getting involved would piss both off
>The PCs *somehow* have to defuse the situation

Shoot the hostage. Take her out of the equation.

One of the hostages isn't human

The group sent in to deal with the "hostages" get trapped in an empty building before another group of would be rescuers (probably the actual authorities) show up and mistake the previous party for the hostage takers due to the misdirection of an unknown mouthpiece for a shadowy crime organization.

Too lazy to see if someone said this already, but I thought the obvious choice would be to make the hostages people he PC's care about.

Half of the hostages have been brain washed to hold the other half prisoners.

This, we can't tell you anything meaningful unless we know what it is about? Are the hostage takers good guys? Bad guys? What technology level? Is magic involved? Are the hostages good, bad, or neutral?