“When Israel and Hamas agreed to a ceasefire in January 2025, on the last day of the Biden administration, President Joe Biden demanded credit. “This is the exact framework of the deal I proposed back in May. Exact,” he said. Of course, that raises the question—if the deal was on the table earlier, why didn’t Biden secure it then?
That ceasefire fell apart after only two months. Seven bloody months later, the Trump administration has finally brokered a new one. President Donald Trump, like Biden before him, wants the credit. “BLESSED ARE THE PEACEMAKERS!” he declared in his announcement of the ceasefire, waxing biblical. (Trump also, bizarrely, tried to credit his tariff policy for the truce.) But like Biden before him, Trump deserves scrutiny for the violence that dragged on when a deal was already on the table.”
“the return of the 20 remaining living hostages who had been taken by Hamas. The terrorist group is still looking for the remains of the 28 hostages they killed, to hopefully return the bodies to the families of those still grieving their loss. Meanwhile, 2,000 Palestinian prisoners were released back to the West Bank and to Khan Younis, in the Gaza Strip, to fulfill the terms of the deal.
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“The main issue still hasn’t been solved: Hamas’s weapons,” Akram Atallah, a London-based Palestinian journalist, told The New York Times. “The Israelis are demanding Hamas disarm, which is not a simple administrative measure. Hamas was founded on the basis of bearing arms.” The most likely possible outcome looks like Hamas refusing disarmament, the Israeli military responding with some amount of continued surveillance and physical presence in the Strip, and some amount of conflict bubbling up sporadically.”
Israel’s decision to go into Gaza City, Hamas’s remaining stronghold, helped get Hamas to agree to a cease fire. Israel’s failed strike on Hamas in Qatar helped put countries like Qatar on notice that Israel was serious, and helped get them to more strongly support a deal. Trump sending people perceived as close to himself as negotiators helped convince Middle East actors that Trump was serious about a deal and that these negotiators negotiated on his behalf. Trump made very strong demands that effectively would amount to a Hamas surrender. Hamas agreed to some, but quibbled with others. Trump just accepted the yes and said we’ll figure out the other stuff later, creating a cease fire.
“Young’s ruling came in response to one of the Trump administration’s signature policies, its attempts to shut down Palestinian solidarity protests by deporting Palestinian students and their supporters. The American Association of University Professors and the Middle East Studies Association sued a few days after the arrest of Columbia University graduate student Mahmoud Khalil, arguing that the policy violates freedom of speech, both by intimidating foreign academics in America and preventing American academics “from hearing from, and associating with, their noncitizen students and colleagues.”
Ruling that administration officials indeed “acted in concert to misuse the sweeping powers of their respective offices to target non-citizen pro-Palestinians for deportation primarily on account of their First Amendment protected political speech,” Young promised to hold a hearing on the specific measures he will order. He wrote that “it will not do simply to order the Public Officials to cease and desist in the future,” given the current political environment.
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The ruling itself meticulously outlined how several different activists—Khalil, Rümeysa Öztürk, Mohsen Mahdawi, Yunseo Chung, and Badar Khan Suri—were targeted for deportation and how the administration justified it, both internally and publicly. Although Secretary of State Marco Rubio repeatedly claimed in the media that the deportations were meant to target “riots” on campus, Young shows that the students were often targeted based on their opinions alone, with vague chains of association linking them to violent protests.”
Trump has a list of what indicates domestic terror. It includes anti-Christianity and other things that Americans are allowed to believe and voice. This is way overboard and is how you use “terrorism” to strip away people’s rights and arrest political opponents.
“At the beginning of the war, the Taliban were almost completely routed, and the U.S. military could have left from a position of strength. The new Afghan republic announced that it had an offer from the Taliban to surrender in exchange for amnesty and a chance to participate in politics. But the Bush administration turned down that offer, settling for nothing less than total, unconditional victory.”