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Quick Hits: Today’s Top Stories
- Amazon Web Services (AWS) returned full coverage Monday evening after a system error that morning caused blackouts, throwing its wide-ranging base of clientele businesses and institutions into digital limbo. Amazon attributed the malfunction to a glitch in its domain name system, or DNS, which is responsible for converting website addresses to IP addresses. The AWS disruption was global, affecting thousands of apps and websites, from corporations and small businesses to universities, airports, and hospitals, among many more.
- Hamas on Monday returned another body to Israel, identified by Israeli forensic specialists as 41-year-old Tal Haimi. Haimi was a rapid response force volunteer whom Hamas shot and killed the morning of October 7, 2023, while defending his kibbutz, Nir Yitzhak. Of the 28 total bodies Hamas agreed to return under the deal, Haimi is the 13th to be received and identified as an Israeli hostage. President Donald Trump, when asked on Monday whether Hamas would adhere to the deal’s terms, stated that the terror group would “behave,” but added, “We’re going to eradicate them if we have to.” U.S. special envoy to the Middle East, Steve Witkoff, and Trump’s son-in-law and first administration foreign policy adviser, Jared Kushner, met with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Monday. Vice President J.D. Vance plans to travel to Jerusalem today.
- Trump told reporters late Sunday night that Ukraine and Russia should agree to a peace deal that redraws their country’s respective borders to the battlefield’s current frontlines. “We think that what they should do is just stop at the lines where they are, the battle line,” Trump said, adding that Ukraine’s contested Donbas region should be “cut up right now.” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said the same day that he would be willing to join Trump and the Russian leader for the pair’s upcoming meeting in Budapest and also announced plans to purchase 25 U.S.-made Patriot air defense systems. According to French President Emmanuel Macron, Zelensky will also be attending a conference of Ukraine’s global allies in London on Friday. Meanwhile, ahead of the Budapest meeting, Secretary of State Marco Rubio spoke on the phone Monday with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov on the summit’s preparations.
- Japan’s parliament elected Sanae Takaichi as the country’s first female prime minister on Tuesday, with the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) president garnering 237 votes to opposition leader Yoshihiko Noda’s 149 in the Lower House. Monday’s coalition agreement between the LDP and the Japan Innovation Party had made Takaichi’s victory nearly certain by delivering the support needed to secure a majority. The 64-year-old conservative, who secured the LDP leadership earlier this month on her third attempt, replaces Shigeru Ishiba and is scheduled to meet Trump later this week. To learn more about Japan’s “Iron Lady,” read the October 10 TMD.
- Republican Rep. Chip Roy of Texas suggested on Monday that GOP senators consider gutting the Senate filibuster, which would allow a simple majority vote in the Senate to pass a bill funding the government and end the ongoing shutdown. Because of the filibuster rules, passage in the Senate requires at least 60 votes, a threshold the body again failed to reach on Monday, voting down a House-passed, GOP-backed funding bill for the 11th time. To learn more about the filibuster, read Friday’s TMD. Meanwhile, states have begun warning recipients of the federally funded Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program that, if the shutdown continues, their benefits in November could be paused.
738 Days Later
Guy Gilboa-Dalal and Evyatar David were childhood friends. When Hamas terrorists abducted them from the Nova music festival on October 7, they also became each other’s source of strength and resilience during much of their long captivity in Gaza. After being separated by their captors two months before their release last week, the two young men finally reunited at a hospital in central Israel.
For each of the 20 surviving hostages to return to Israel on October 13, similar poignant scenes brought a sense of healing to a nation divided by its longest war. The abductees' return, after 738 days, came as part of a U.S.-backed ceasefire and hostage deal designed to bring an end to the two-year conflict. But the agreement has already faced early tests, following alleged violations by Hamas and renewed fighting over the weekend.
On October 13, Israel and Hamas initiated the first phase of the deal, in which Israel released 1,968 Palestinian prisoners—250 serving life sentences and 1,718 Gazans arrested over the course of the war—in exchange for the return of all living and deceased Israeli hostages. The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) also agreed to partially withdraw, drawing forces back behind a pre-determined boundary called the “Yellow Line” while allowing Israel to continue controlling 53 percent of the Gaza Strip.
But the arrangement soured when Hamas claimed it was not positioned to return the remains of the deceased hostages within the agreed-upon 72-hour window. Then, on Sunday, terrorists killed two Israeli soldiers in an RPG attack in southern Gaza, prompting Israel to strike Hamas targets in the enclave and causing a one-day lapse in the ceasefire only nine days after it took effect.
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The deal hasn’t kept the peace, but then again, that’s never what it was intended to do. “It’s not a peace agreement,” Aaron David Miller, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and a former State Department adviser and analyst, told TMD. “It is a moment created by an impressive, unprecedented intervention.”
The plan creates the momentum for a lasting diplomatic solution to the war, but it is also rife with potential pitfalls. Phase two calls for Hamas’ disarmament, the complete withdrawal of IDF forces from Gaza, and the creation of an internationally backed board to oversee a new Palestinian governing body. Danielle Gilbert, an assistant professor of political science at Northwestern University, told TMD that the deal is designed to flow “to the next stage, and the next stage, and the next stage, but it also gives them kind of an unlimited number of off-ramps that the deal could fall apart at any moment.”
There are incentives on all sides to see the whole agreement come to fruition. But, for Israel, the release of the living hostages is the deal’s most important achievement, particularly given the emerging reports of the psychological and physical torture the captives endured in Gaza. One former hostage recounted to his family how his captors locked him in a cage, provided him salt water to drink, and whipped him until he lost consciousness. A family member of another hostage told Israeli media that the terrorists would show occasional signs of humanity—such as inviting hostages to their card games when down a player. But the captors could, at any moment, put a gun to their head and threaten to kill them unless they followed their orders, such as appearing in a propaganda video. Hamas toyed with their captives right up until their handover, with Gilboa-Dalal being told that he was moments away from being freed on three consecutive days leading up to his actual release, according to his father.
Getting the surviving hostages back was Israel’s top priority. But the country is also on a mission to bring home all the hostages taken on October 7, even if that means in a casket. “The biggest problem, I think, for the Israelis is that Hamas keeps hostages, the deceased hostages,” Joe Truzman, a senior research analyst at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and editor of the think-tank’s Long War Journal, told TMD. “Whether it’s one, two, or five, that's a problem.”
Hamas returned only four of the 28 deceased hostages October 13, one of which Israeli forensic specialists later identified as a Palestinian; and on October 15, shortly after Hamas returned its ninth confirmed hostage, the terrorist group stated that locating the rest “requires great effort and special equipment.” After pressure from Israel, they have returned a further four bodies, leaving 15 yet to be returned. The most recent hostage body was returned Monday and identified as 41-year-old Tal Haimi, a Kibbutz Nir Yitzhak resident who was killed on October 7 while defending his community from terrorist attackers.
In addition to retaining the bodies of hostages, Hamas has breached its commitment to cease hostilities against Israeli troops. Terrorists on Sunday attacked IDF soldiers in the southern Gaza city of Rafah. Per an initial IDF investigation, terrorists emerged from tunnels in the area and attacked IDF soldiers with anti-tank missiles and gunfire, killing two while they were using an excavator: 26-year-old Maj. Yaniv Kula and 21-year-old Staff Sgt. Itay Yavetz.
The IDF said that Hamas operatives were behind the attack, while Hamas denied responsibility, stating that, because Rafah is currently under Israeli control, it had no recent communications with fighters in the area. The IDF responded by launching airstrikes targeting Hamas infrastructure across Gaza, and temporarily suspending aid to the Gaza Strip, before later reinstating both ceasefire protocol and the flow of humanitarian supplies by the end of day.
Some analysts are not surprised by Hamas’ early violations of the deal. Brig. Gen. (Res.) Yossi Kuperwasser, director of the Jerusalem Institute for Strategy and Security and former head of the IDF Intelligence Corps’ Research Division, speculated that Hamas had likely planned from the start to stall the hostage return process to prevent the deal from entering entering its second phase, which lays out the process of disarmament. “They are not going to willingly disarm,” he told TMD. “If Hamas does not disarm, then the plan is stuck and nothing is going to move forward.” On Saturday, an unnamed senior Hamas official acknowledged this strategy, telling Reuters that the terror group plans to control Gaza City in the interim and would not commit to laying down its arms. Still, it’s not clear that Hamas is immediately ready to discard the accord, but whether or not the remaining bodies are returned may be a bellwether. “That’s an indication of whether they committed to the plan,” Kuperwasser said.
Meanwhile, Hamas has embarked on a brutal crackdown on its Palestinian opponents in the Strip, carrying out extrajudicial executions on the streets. Since the ceasefire’s start, the group has targeted rival militias, alleged Israeli collaborators, and others perceived to challenge its dominance in the territory, killing at least 33 Palestinians. At least eight were publicly executed on the street in Gaza City, killings that a Hamas military unit recorded and shared online with the accompanying text, “This is the fate of every traitor to the homeland and to religion.”
Amid the terrorist group’s effort to consolidate power, there is little reason to believe that the terrorist group will advance to the next part of the deal: disarm and cease its governance over the Gaza Strip.
So when Hamas uploads its atrocities to the internet, it has a precise audience in mind. “It’s for the Palestinian public, it’s for the international community, and, of course, Israel as well,” Truzman said. It’s a direct threat to any force, Israeli or Palestinian, opposed to Hamas rule, while also communicating to “the international community that it’s again asserting its power in the Gaza Strip, it’s regaining its foothold,” he continued. “They’re monopolizing the Gaza Strip, they are gaining power. They have no intention at all to lay down arms, and that was pretty obvious from the get-go.”
The gangs opposing Hamas don’t currently have the finances, manpower, or resources necessary to dismantle the terror group’s grip on the enclave. But Hamas’ efforts to forcibly cow them is also a reflection of its own weakness after 24 months of war.
“They didn’t need to do this two and a half years ago,” Daniel Byman, a professor at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service and the director of the Warfare, Irregular Threats, and Terrorism Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told TMD. “Hamas is significantly weaker than it was two years ago, right? And it’s weaker, not just obviously because it lost all its [top-ranking] people, but it’s weaker militarily, and it has more local groups and clans … that are more willing to challenge the group.”
Today’s Must-Read
If the last 500 years of unprecedented economic growth across the world have taught us anything, it’s that markets, when they work well, are incredibly effective at generating wealth, addressing human needs, and distributing resources efficiently across the economy. Whether it be advances in medical technology, improvements in crop yields, or something as simple as the manufacturing of a pencil, free markets have found ways to direct individual self-interest toward pursuits that contribute to the common good. But what happens when markets don’t work well? What happens when the individual incentives provided by free markets lead to bad outcomes for society as a whole? This brings us to the tragedy of the commons—an economic concept that shows how misalignments between individual incentives and the common good can result in market failures.
Toeing the Company Line
The French Are Just Ahead of the Curve
They’ve already learned a stronger presidency cannot solve a nation’s biggest problems.
‘The Silliness Is the Point’
Mixed feelings about ‘No Kings.’
Why U.S. Biosecurity Needs to Keep Pace With Emerging Tech
Researchers see a limited window for America to prepare for the risks of the next biotechnology revolution.
‘Visa Revoked’: The State Department’s Very Online Retribution Campaign
At least six foreign nationals have lost their visas for commenting on the death of Charlie Kirk.
Videos Claiming to Show National Guard in Portland Are From 2020 Riots
Current ongoing protests in the city have been largely peaceful.
In Other News
Today in America:
- The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals on Tuesday ruled that President Donald Trump could order troops into Portland, Oregon.
- The U.S. and Australia on Monday signed a critical minerals agreement, committing to invest $1 billion in each other’s minerals industry in the next six months and setting price floors.
- The Department of Health and Human Services will soon unveil new guidance encouraging the consumption of some foods containing high amounts of saturated fats and will also launch an FDA review of baby formula rules.
- Lawyers for former FBI Director James Comey filed motions seeking to have the two-count federal indictment against him dismissed, arguing that the prosecution is vindictive and unlawful.
- Trump said Monday that he is planning to visit China “fairly early next year.”
- American chess grandmaster Daniel Naroditsky died on Monday at 29 years old.
Around the World:
- Colombia recalled its ambassador to the U.S. on Monday, after Trump called the country’s president, Gustavo Petro, an “illegal drug leader” and halted aid.
- Cameroonian opposition candidate Issa Tchiroma Bakary declared victory in the country’s presidential election over 92-year-old President Paul Biya, with tensions growing and official results expected Thursday.
- Argentina and the U.S. officially confirmed a $20 billion currency swap on Monday intended to strengthen Argentina’s peso. Soon after, the peso fell to new lows.
- London’s Metropolitan Police announced Monday that non-crime hate incidents would no longer be investigated, following last month’s arrest of comedy writer Graham Linehan on suspicion of inciting violence through three social media posts.
- After defeating the Seattle Mariners 4-3 last night in Game 7 of the American League Championship Series, the Toronto Blue Jays will face the Los Angeles Dodgers in the Canadian team’s first World Series since 1993.
On the Money:
- Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, who is also acting NASA administrator, said Monday that SpaceX was behind schedule on NASA’s Artemis III moon mission, so he would open the contract to other companies.
- Anthropic announced a new version of its AI, Claude for Life Sciences, aimed at helping scientific researchers and a web- and iOS-version of their AI programming tool, Claude Code.
- U.S. natural gas futures rose 8 percent as demand ramps up for the colder months.
- Molson Coors, which also makes Miller Lite and Blue Moon beer, announced that it was cutting 9 percent of its U.S. workforce and expanding into new products while the U.S. beer market faces a slump.
- China’s movie industry bombed over the country’s National Day holiday with its weakest ticket sales in almost a decade.
Worth Your Time:
- An excerpt from Jonathan Karl’s upcoming book, Retribution: Donald Trump and the Campaign That Changed America (including contributions from The Dispatch executive editor Declan Garvey), about Steve Bannon’s time in prison. (The Atlantic)
- New York Times Editorial Board: “The Partisans Are Wrong: Moving to the Center Is the Way to Win.” (New York Times)
- Sophie Alexander on the tech-right investors trying to put a giant statue of Prometheus on Alcatraz island. (Bloomberg)
- Aidan McLaughlin reports on Pete Hegseth’s fight against the press. (Vanity Fair)
- Robert O’Connell and Harriet Ryan on Aspiration, the eco-bank at the center of the controversy involving Los Angeles Clippers owner Steve Ballmer and player Kawhi Leonard. (WSJ)
- Ed Caesar on the Irish “cocaine kingpin” freely running his empire in the U.A.E. (The New Yorker)
- Peter Robinson’s interview with Thomas Sowell. (Uncommon Knowledge)
Presented Without Comment
Politico: Trump Nominee Says MLK Jr. Holiday Belongs in ‘Hell’ and That He Has ‘Nazi Streak,’ According to Texts
Also Presented Without Comment
Forbes: For Hooters’ Original Founders, Saving The Chain Is a Higher Calling: ‘America Needs Us.’
Also Also Presented Without Comment
Techspot: China Is Testing Restroom Machines That Make You Watch Ads in Exchange for Toilet Paper
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