Dan and I decided to turn parts of our ME201 discussion yesterday into today’s podcast, so you’ll hear a few voices from the class asking questions.

Supposedly, the ceasefire is now back on. Amit Segal is another great journalist to follow; he writes:

It’s Monday, October 20, and the strikes in Gaza have stopped, the ceasefire has been renewed, and humanitarian aid has resumed—and Israel is also preparing to receive a hostage’s body from Hamas tonight. So, does that mean yesterday’s strikes in Gaza wielded the desired results?

On one hand, as I wrote yesterday, just as the IDF did with Hezbollah following its immediate violation of the November 2024 ceasefire, yesterday was an opportunity for the IDF to use overwhelming force to enforce the ceasefire.

Initially, that seemed to be the direction Israel was taking. Hours after the IDF began striking targets in Gaza, Hamas announced that it would hand over the body of a hostage that it had just located “if conditions on the ground allow.” Some two hours later, an Israeli source said that the political echelon instructed COGAT not to allow the transfer of humanitarian aid to Gaza today. And now, with a hostage’s body expected to be returned tonight, it seems to have worked—at least on face value.

But as he writes—and as Dan and I have both stressed, repeatedly—the real problem is disarming Hamas and demilitarizing Gaza. Segal writes that there are two possibilities. First, as Trump seems (perhaps) to envision, a multinational force will enter Gaza and dismantle Hamas. Israel is dubious. It would prefer option two—sending in the IDF. Trump has said he’ll green light this if Hamas doesn’t disarm.

Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff are back in Israel, reportedly to urge Netanyahu not to take any action that could further endanger the ceasefire:

The pair also met with senior IDF officials to verify progress on the deal, the report says. “Do not act in a way that would endanger the ceasefire. We want to do everything to reach the second phase,” the envoys reportedly told Netanyahu, adding that while “self-defense” is acceptable, “risking the ceasefire” is not.

Netanyahu and Strategic Affairs Minister Ron Dermer, who also attended the meeting, conveyed that Israel remains committed to the ceasefire framework and expects Hamas to uphold its side of the agreement, the Hebrew network adds.

In a highly unusual occurrence, the two Trump envoys also met with two IDF major generals today, Channel 12 says. According to the network, they sat down with the head of the IDF’s Technological Division and the head of Military Intelligence to assess Israel’s efforts to advance Trump framework.

JD Vance, too, is on the way. I’m not sure why. Perhaps to persuade Israelis that any concession would be preferable to having him lurk around and scold them over their ingratitude.

Trump, addressing the media, said that Hamas’s violation of the ceasefire “would be taken care of quickly.”

“They’re going to be nice, and if they’re not ... we’re going to eradicate them if we have to. They’ll be eradicated—and they know that.” He added that at this time, he has not told Israel to resume strikes in Gaza and that the US was “taking lots of steps to maintain ceasefire.”

While you’re reading Amit Segal, here’s an interesting account: Behind closed doors: How the deal with Hamas was born—the inside story:

If Israelis had heard how the President of the United States spoke about the hostages, it’s doubtful that he would have received such thunderous cheers at Hostages’ Square last Saturday night. To say they were a secondary concern for him would be an understatement — and even that understates it. Donald Trump favored eliminating Hamas the American way, and 20 living hostages (he was always confused about their number and minimized it — I wonder what Sigmund Freud would have said) seemed to him a marginal matter, collateral damage.

Only belatedly did he perceive how strategic the issue was for the Israelis, and therefore for their government as well. In the United States, presidents have usually not been criticized for meeting hostages’ families too little, but for doing so too often (for details, Google “Ronald Reagan”).

In one of the discussions before Operation Gideon’s Chariots B began, Benjamin Netanyahu spoke about the scar that would remain in Israeli society if the IDF conquered Gaza City at the cost of the hostages’ lives. Allow me to guess that he never really believed that moment would come. Indeed, in recent months, Netanyahu and Ron Dermer’s assessment was that an operation to conquer Gaza City, if it happens, may well begin, but most certainly would not reach completion. Here is the inside story. …

There’s a line in it that should really attract scrutiny: “Netanyahu called President Trump minutes [before striking Qatar], but the president was groggy after a late night of discussions. It took time to reach him. The strike went ahead.” Groggy? Too groggy to take an urgent call? How often does that happen? Journalists might want to ask.

Here, by the way, is the 60 Minutes interview with Kushner and Witkoff. Lesley Stahl is anything but an incisive interviewer—what a wasted opportunity!—but I still found it interesting. The very end of the interview contains a few surprises: Apparently, Iran has been calling, asking Trump for a deal. True? I have no idea. Witkoff seems so guileless that it’s hard to imagine he’s just making that up out of whole cloth; then again, no member of the Trump Administration could be constitutionally incapable of making something up out of whole cloth. It’s a job requirement.

Subscribe now

Share

The Ayatollah Khamenei does not seem to be of the same view. He just told Trump to “keep dreaming” if he think Iran’s nuclear facilities have been destroyed:

Khamenei also rejected Trump’s offer to resume nuclear negotiations that were cut short when Israel struck the Islamic Republic on June 13, leading to 12 days of war during which Trump ordered the unprecedented strikes on Iran. “The US president proudly says they bombed and destroyed Iran’s nuclear industry. Very well, keep dreaming!” said Khamenei in comments posted to his website.

Speaking of Witkoff’s guilelessness, an awfully queasy anecdote begins at about 26:40 . The exchange was clearly planned in advance, because Stahl’s line of questioning indicates she’s heard this story from them before:

STAHL: So, you get to the meeting in Egypt and you’re in a meeting with the chief Hamas negotiator, right? And you’re meeting him for the first time. This is just a month after the attack in Doha.

WITKOFF: So, we got into the room. The lead negotiator was sitting right next to me.

STAHL: That negotiator was in Doha when the Israelis struck.

WITKOFF: Correct.

STAHL: He survived, but his son was killed. Is that right?

WITKOFF: That’s right. And we expressed our condolences to him for the loss of his son—he mentioned it—and I told him that I had lost a son and that we were both members of a really bad club: parents who had buried children. And, um, you know, Jared describes it maybe a little bit better than me—

STAHL: —because you were watching.

KUSHNER: Yeah. What I saw at that moment was very interesting. You had—we go into a room and you have the Qataris, the Turks, and the Egyptians. And then we meet the four representatives of Hamas, which is a terrorist organization. And I’m looking at these guys and I’m thinking, “These are hardened guys who have been through two years of war. They’ve obviously, you know, they green lit an assault that raped and murdered and did some of the most barbaric things. They’ve been holding hostages while they’re, they’re, while Gaza’s been, you know, bombed. And they’ve, they’ve withstood all the suffering. But when Steve and him spoke about their sons, it turned from a negotiation with a terrorist group to seeing two human beings kind of showing a vulnerability with each other.

Bonding with a blood-soaked monster over the shared experience of losing a son is strange, but perhaps that’s the sort of thing that happens in negotiations like this. Hostage negotiators do, in fact, build rapport with disgusting people; it’s part of the trade.

But they’re presenting this as if they were genuinely moved by it. They’re making a point of doing so.

Why is Witkoff telling us that he and a Hamas negotiator—men separated by a canyon of blood—bonded over their dead sons? In a closed