On the menu today: When your beat is the whole wide world, from Ukraine to Syria to Taiwan to India, the news is almost never as good as it is today. So, let’s savor today’s images of the Israeli hostages finally reunited with their families. The Israeli hostages were held 296 days longer than the Iranian regime held the American hostages in 1979-1981.
How the Hostages Came Home
It’s understandable if you thought you would never see this headline: “Last 20 living hostages return to Israel.”
It is a spectacular breakthrough, and yet not every Israeli taken by Hamas is home yet, as our Jessica Hornik notes:
There are some two dozen hostages who are deceased. Among them are two American-Israelis, Itay Chen and Omer Neutra. Some of the dead were murdered by Hamas on October 7, their bodies taken into Gaza. Others were murdered in captivity. As part of the agreement, Hamas must return all their remains. The Chen and Neutra families, and all the families of the dead, may finally be able to bury their loved ones.
This is likely the greatest day of Trump’s second term, so far. The Israelis are thrilled and are effusively singing the president’s praises:
Addressing US President Donald Trump at the Knesset, Opposition Leader Yair Lapid lauds the American leader for saving “millions from the horrors of war,” stating that he has “done the unimaginable.”
“Mr. President, you have saved the lives of our hostages. But you saved so much more. You have saved the souls of the bereaved whose loved ones now will be brought home for burial, you have saved thousands of soldiers who will not fall in battle, and you have saved millions from the horrors of war. You have saved far more than one life, and each life is an entire world,” Lapid declares in the Knesset plenum ahead of Trump’s address to the body.
“When you were elected, you declared that you would be ‘the President of Peace.’ You have kept your word. The fact that you were not awarded the Nobel Peace Prize is a grave mistake by the committee — but they will have no choice, Mr. President. They will have to award it to you next year,” Lapid says.
I have been more than a little critical of presidential special envoy Steve Witkoff; past comments like “Hamas duped me” gave us plenty of reasons to wonder if the first-time diplomat was really the right guy to send to tackle the toughest international problems in direct negotiations with dictators, thugs, and terrorist groups.
And yet, here we are. Witkoff and Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, were instrumental to the deal, and they managed to get results where no one else had succeeded:
Last Friday, when Jared Kushner heard that Hamas would begin talks to release Israeli hostages, he was fielding calls at his mansion, which sits on a man-made island just north of Miami. He jumped into his car and drove the 20 minutes to another mansion — this one owned by the billionaire Steve Witkoff, President Trump’s Middle East peace envoy.
In those crucial moments, the Trump administration’s diplomatic power center was not in Washington but in one of the wealthiest enclaves in Florida.
The two real estate developers, charged with closing the deal on a prime piece of Mr. Trump’s foreign policy ambitions, got to work setting up a command center, where they made and fielded calls from stakeholders, including an impatient president and cabinet members in the Israeli government.
Khaled Elgindy, a visiting scholar at Georgetown University’s Center for Contemporary Arab Studies, told Isaac Chotiner of the New Yorker that Hamas was willing to release the hostages in exchange for a declaration that Israel’s war against them was over:
I think Hamas has been willing to make a deal to release the hostages, to release all of them, but in return for some kind of assurance that the war would actually end. And I don’t think that’s an outrageous demand — that if they’re going to give up their one piece of leverage, they should have some reasonable assurance that the war is going to end. They thought they had that in January of 2025, and then they didn’t. Netanyahu’s word, and President Trump’s word, did not amount to much at that point.
But I do think Hamas’s calculations have changed because the group is much weaker now. I think the other stakeholders in the region, the Arab states especially, are fed up and want this to end. And so when Trump put forward his plan, as lopsided as it was, the Arab states and others embraced it, not because they loved the terms but because they just wanted to be done with this. That put Hamas in a very difficult position. If they were to accept the plan as it was laid out, it was basically the terms of their surrender. They’re supposed to hand over their weapons. Gaza is going to be controlled indefinitely by the Israeli Army and there will be an international force, and politically it will be overseen by some international trusteeship headed by Trump. This is not something that any Palestinian would welcome. So that really puts them in a bind. But they managed to find a way to say “yes, but” and that was really the only possible response they could have had. They couldn’t say no. They couldn’t say no to the President of the United States, especially when the Arab states were saying yes. And, also, they couldn’t say no to the people in Gaza who were so desperate for this to end and who were basically demanding that Hamas just accept the terms as they were.
In that interview, Elgindy insists that the Israeli airstrike against Hamas leaders in Doha, Qatar, on September 9 was a major blunder. Color me a little skeptical of that assessment; I can’t help but notice that Hamas suddenly got a lot more agreeable right after 15 Israel Defense Force fighter jets dropped ten bombs on their luxury villas 1,110 miles away from Israel. For Hamas’s top officials, the war and Israeli wrath were suddenly not just “over there,” they were “over here.”
Defeat is an orphan; success has a thousand fathers. There’s something absurdly funny about Joe Biden’s secretary of state Antony Blinken metaphorically rushing on stage like Kanye West to Taylor Swift and declaring, “Imma let you finish, but this is essentially the plan that we developed over many months and more or less left in a drawer for the incoming administration, and I’m very, very glad they picked it up.”
Politico reports that the Biden foreign policy team has “bittersweet feelings” and are “arguing that they laid the groundwork for Trump’s effort and that he could have executed on it much earlier.”
Oh, shove it. Joe Biden was president for one year, three months and 13 days of this crisis. He and his team had plenty of opportunities to attempt to negotiate a deal like this one. They couldn’t get the parties to “yes.” Maybe it’s because the president was a doddering old man and couldn’t focus. Maybe it’s because the vice president kept offering “performative scolding” of Israel because of Democratic Party politics and alienating Netanyahu. Or maybe it’s because no one in the Middle East really feared crossing the Biden administration. With Trump, you never really know what he’s going to do, so it makes sense to at least appear to be agreeable, play ball, and keep your options open.
Amidst the joy, it is natural to be skeptical of the long-term success of the nascent cease-fire and peace deal. As I have laid out in this newsletter numerous times, Hamas is the ultimate bad-faith negotiator. Hamas broke cease-fires with Israel in 2003, 2007, 2008, and nine times in 2014. During this most recent portion of the conflict, Hamas either rejected cease-fire proposals or hostages-for-prisoners trades, walked away from the table, or refused to restart negotiations in the months of December 2023, January, February, March, April, May, June, and July 2024. As I wrote in January, “Hamas has proven a bad-faith, bloodthirsty, irrational, and self-destructive negotiator at every step in this process. At the beginning of September [2024], Hamas fighters executed six hostages, including Israeli-American dual citizen Hersh Goldberg-Polin, as IDF forces closed in on their hideout.”
On paper, Hamas is supposed to go out of business in the not-too-distant future. The 13th point in the Trump administration’s 20-point plan is:
13. Hamas and other factions agree to not have any role in the governance of Gaza, directly, indirectly, or in any form. All military, terror, and offensive infrastructure, including tunnels and weapon production facilities, will be destroyed and not rebuilt. There will be a process of demilitarization of Gaza under the supervision of independent monitors, which will include placing weapons permanently beyond use through an agreed process of decommissioning, and supported by an internationally funded buy back and reintegration program all verified by the independent monitors. New Gaza will be fully committed to building a prosperous economy and to peaceful coexistence with their neighbors.
Think Hamas is going to go gently into that good night? Heck, if Trump can make that happen, give him two Nobel Peace Prizes next year.
Xi Jinping’s Regime Is Jailing Christian Pastors Again
Awful news out of China, where the regime has decided to crack down on Christian leaders again. The Wall Street Journal editorial board reports:
Police on Friday detained Ezra Jin Mingri, a pastor who founded Beijing Zion Church in 2007, according to his daughter Grace Jin, who lives in the U.S. Pastor Jin was living in Beihai in Guangxi Province.
Mr. Jin’s ministry has become one of China’s largest, with congregations across the country. Ms. Jin told the Journal that other Zion Church pastors and workers were taken into custody or are missing in cities around the country. Once people disappear in the hands of Chinese police, they are in grave danger of abuse and long detention, often without charge or trial.
I was glad to see Secretary of State Marco Rubio post on X, “The United States condemns the Chinese Communist Party’s recent detention of dozens of leaders of the unregistered Zion Church in China, including prominent pastor Mingri ‘Ezra’ Jin. We call for their immediate release.”
A few hours later, on Truth Social, the president posted:
Don’t worry about China, it will all be fine! Highly respected President Xi just had a bad moment. He doesn’t want Depression for his country, and neither do I. The U.S.A. wants to help China, not hurt it!!! President DJT
It would help Pastor Jin’s fate if the president communicated to the world that he desired to see him released.
ADDENDUM: Rest in peace, Diane Keaton. She lived a long and accomplished life, free from the menace of spiders.