The Dictatorship
Israel and Hamas agree to ‘first phase’ of plan to end fighting and release hostages, Trump says
WASHINGTON (AP) — Israel and Hamas agreed Wednesday to pause fighting in Gaza so that the remaining hostages there can be freed in the coming days in exchange for Palestinian prisoners, accepting elements of a plan put forward by the Trump administration that would represent the biggest breakthrough in months in the devastating two-year-old war.
“This means that ALL of the Hostages will be released very soon, and Israel will withdraw their Troops to an agreed upon line as the first steps toward a Strong, Durable, and Everlasting Peace,” President Donald Trump wrote on social media in trumpeting the agreement. “All Parties will be treated fairly!”
Israel and Hamas separately confirmed the contours of their deal, which drew celebratory gatherings from hostage families in Tel Aviv and cautious optimism from some in Gaza. Hamas intends to release all 20 living hostages in a matter of days, while the Israeli military will begin a withdrawal from the majority of Gaza, people familiar with the matter told The Associated Press on condition of anonymity to discuss details of an agreement that has not fully been made public.
Uncertainty remains about some of the thornier aspects of Trump’s proposal — such as whether and how Hamas will disarm, and who will govern Gaza — but the sides appear closer than they have been in several months to ending a war that has killed tens of thousands of Palestinians, destroyed most of Gaza and triggered other armed conflicts across the Middle East. The war, which began with Hamas’ deadly attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, has sparked worldwide protests and brought allegations of genocide that Israel denies.
Israel is more isolated than it has been in decades and Israelis have been bitterly divided over the failure to return the hostages. Palestinians’ dream of an independent state, meanwhile, appears more remote than ever despite recent moves by major Western countries to recognize one. With the outlook bleak as the war’s two-year anniversary approached, the Trump administration put forward a plan last month that it hoped would result in a permanent end to the war and bring about a sustainable peace in the region.
Talks to hammer out a deal have been underway in Egypt since the start of the week, and by the end of the third day of negotiations, a breakthrough emerged.
“With God’s help we will bring them all home,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu proclaimed on social media shortly after Trump announced an agreement on the first phase of his plan was at hand. Netanyahu said he would convene the government on Thursday to approve the deal.
For its part, Hamas called on Trump and the mediators to ensure that Israel implements “without disavowal or delay” a deal that it said would require the withdrawal of Israeli troops from Gaza, the entry of aid into the territory and the exchange of prisoners for hostages.
It was unclear from Trump’s statement how much progress has been made on the most divisive aspects of his plan, such as Hamas’ potential disarmament — a demand Israel has insisted upon but the militant group has repeatedly refused. Hamas has long said it will not release the remaining hostages without a lasting ceasefire and guarantees the war would not resume after they are freed.
Trump’s peace plan
The Trump plan called for an immediate ceasefire and release of the 48 hostages that militants in Gaza still hold from their attack on Israel two years ago. Some 1,200 people were killed by Hamas-led militants, and 251 were taken hostage. Around 20 of the hostages are believed to still be alive.
In an interview on Fox News, Trump said Hamas will begin releasing hostages “probably” on Monday.
“This is more than Gaza,” he said. “This is peace in the Middle East.”
Officials have expressed concerns over how long it may take Hamas and other Palestinian militant groups holding Israelis to locate and return the remains of those believed to be dead, as required under the agreement.
Under the plan conceived by Trump, Israel would maintain an open-ended military presence inside Gaza, along its border with Israel. An international force, comprised largely of troops from Arab and Muslim countries, would be responsible for security inside Gaza. The U.S. would lead a massive internationally funded reconstruction effort in Gaza.
The plan also envisions an eventual role for the Palestinian Authority — something Netanyahu opposes. But it requires the authority, which administers parts of the West Bank, to undergo a sweeping reform program that could take years to implement.
The Trump plan is even more vague about a future Palestinian state, which Netanyahu firmly rejects.
Even as many details of Trump’s full plan have yet to be agreed to by both sides, some Palestinians and Israelis expressed happiness and relief at the significant progress that had been made.
“It’s a huge day, huge joy,” Ahmed Sheheiber, a Palestinian displaced man from northern Gaza, said of the ceasefire deal.
Crying over the phone from his shelter in Gaza City, he said he was waiting “impatiently” for the ceasefire to go into effect to return to his home in the Jabaliya refugee camp.
Joyful hostage families and their supporters began spilling into the central Tel Aviv square that has become the main gathering point in the struggle to free the captives. Some popped open a bottle of Champagne and cheered. Crying tears of joy, families hugged released hostages as the square continued to fill with Israelis.
Einav Zangauker, the mother of Israeli captive Matan Zangauker and a prominent advocate for hostages’ freedom, told reporters that she wants to tell her son she loves him.
“I want to smell his smell,” she said. “If I have one dream, it is seeing Matan sleep in his own bed.”
Hints of progress
The arrival of Trump’s Middle East envoy, Steve Witkoff, and the president’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, on Wednesday at Sharm el-Sheikh for the peace talks, which were also attended by Qatar’s prime minister, Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani, was a sign that negotiators aimed to dive deeply into the toughest issues of the American plan to end the war. Netanyahu’s top adviser, Ron Dermer, was also present for the talks.
Trump expressed optimism earlier in the day by saying that he was considering a trip to the Middle East within a matter of days.
Yet another hint of an emerging deal came later in that event when U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio passed Trump a note on White House stationery that read, “You need to approve a Truth Social post soon so you can announce deal first.” Truth Social is the president’s preferred social media platform.
The note prompted Trump to proclaim, “We’re very close to a deal in the Middle East.”
This would be the third ceasefire reached since the start of the war. The first, in November 2023, saw more than 100 hostages, mainly women and children, freed in exchange for Palestinian prisoners before it broke down. In the second, in January and February of this year, Palestinian militants released 25 Israeli hostages and the bodies of eight more in exchange for nearly 2,000 Palestinian prisoners. Israel ended that ceasefire in March with a surprise bombardment.
Praying for a deal
A growing number of experts, including those commissioned by a U.N. bodyhave said that Israel’s offensive in Gaza amounts to genocide — an accusation Israel denies. More than 67,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza and nearly 170,000 wounded, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry.
The ministry, which doesn’t differentiate between civilians and combatants but says around half of the deaths were women and children, is part of the Hamas-run government. The United Nations and many independent experts consider its figures to be the most reliable estimate of wartime casualties.
In the Gaza Strip, where much of the territory lies in ruinsPalestinians have been desperate for a breakthrough. Thousands fleeing Israel’s latest ground offensive in northern Gaza and Gaza City have set up makeshift tents along the beach in the central part of the territory, sometimes using blankets for shelter.
Ayman Saber, a Palestinian from Khan Younis, reacted to the ceasefire announcement by saying he plans to return to his home city and try to rebuild his house, which was destroyed last year by an Israeli strike.
“I will rebuild the house, we will rebuild Gaza,” he said.
___
Associated Press writers Eric Tucker in Washington, Sarah El Deeb in Beirut and Melanie Lidman in Tel Aviv contributed to this report. Magdy reported from Cairo and Mednick from Tel Aviv, Israel.
This is an adapted excerpt from the March 24 episode of “All In with Chris Hayes.”
Donald Trump’s war on Iran is in its fourth week. Gas prices are up $1 a gallon in much of the country. Stocks continue to fall on fears of global supply shortages.
The death toll is growing. Thirteen American service members have lost their livesand more than 1,200 Iranians have been killed, along with upward of 1,000 people in Lebanonmore than 150 in the surrounding Gulf states and 17 Israelis. That’s not accounting for the millions who are displaced and the thousands who have been injured, including hundreds of U.S. troops.
But according to the president who launched the war, it’s all over.
It is becoming increasingly clear that Trump expected a fast and easy win.
“We’ve won this. This war has been won,” he told reporters Tuesday in the Oval Office. “The only one that likes to keep it going is the fake news.”
However, during those same remarks, Trump was all over the place — talking about an epic victory, ongoing peace negotiations and personal gifts.
It was all completely counter to his posture over the weekend, when he threatened to “obliterate” Iranian civilian power plants — essentially teasing a war crime — if Iran did not stop blocking oil tankers in the Strait of Hormuzsomething Iran was not doing before Trump attacked them.
But now, he has supposedly pressed pause on that bombing plan for five days because, he said, the negotiations are going well.
When he first announced that in a social media post Monday, it sent oil prices down 10% and boosted stocks.
However, those markets reversed themselves Tuesday after the Iranians said they have not engaged in any serious high-level negotiations with the Americans, and they claimed Trump was making things up to help oil prices. The Israelis said the same thing. (That’s not to say you should take Iran’s word for it, or Israel’s, but you shouldn’t take the White House’s word, either.)
It is becoming increasingly clear that Trump expected a fast and easy win. He had no plan B, and now he is flailing to find some kind of fallback position.
On Monday, sources from the administration told Politico that they have their eyes on a future U.S.-backed leader of Iran: Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, speaker of the Iranian parliament.
“He’s a hot option,” one unnamed U.S. source — who seems to really wants a deal — told Blue Light News. “He’s one of the highest. … But we got to test them, and we can’t rush into it.”
But on Tuesday, that “hot option” trolled Trump for what he called a “jawboning campaign” to stabilize oil prices. In a social media postGhalibaf wrote: “[L]et’s see if they can turn that into ‘actual fuel’ at the pump — or maybe even print gas molecules!”
Call it the fog of Trumpian war: a million contradictory messages flying around, constantly wildly pinging bits of news that don’t make sense together.
Right now, we have reports that Trump’s negotiators, including his envoy Steve Witkoff and Vice President JD Vance, are traveling to Pakistan for informal talks with an Iranian official.
At the same time, unnamed U.S. officials have told The New York Times that the Saudi crown prince is pushing Trump to continue the war until Iran’s government collapses — something the Saudis publicly deny.
In fact, The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Saudi officials are holding talks in Riyadh with their Arab counterparts to find a diplomatic off-ramp from the war.
On Tuesday evening, U.S. officials said the Pentagon was poised to deploy 3,000 troops of the 82nd Airborne Division to the Middle East. That is in addition to two Marine expeditionary units on their way to the region and the 50,000 U.S. troops already stationed there.
Also on Tuesday, Iranian-backed militias in Iraq are claiming that U.S. strikes there killed 30 of their members.
But, according to Trump, the peace talks are going great, right?
All eyes everywhere have been on the Strait of Hormuz, where Iran responded to the U.S. attack by striking oil tankers and shutting down 20% of the world’s supply of oil and liquefied natural gas. It is now essentially running a toll operation in the strait.
Some countries, such as China, Japan and India, are negotiating deals with Iran to get its oil out. Which is to say, Iran is shipping more oil and making more money than it was under the U.S. sanctions in place before Trump attacked it.
It’s clear the president sees what’s happening, so now he is trying to share control of the strait with Iran. Trump told reporters the strait would be “jointly controlled” by “maybe” him and “the next ayatollah.”
The administration really thought this was going to be another Venezuela. They told themselves that, and they were egged on to believe it by the staunchest advocates of the war, such as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Sen. Lindsey GrahamR-S.C.
But in Iran, a decapitation strike did not lead to mass uprisings. It did not lead to regime change. It led to the situation in which Iran’s regime is intact, even if militarily degraded, and they now have explicit control of the Strait of Hormuz — a huge pressure point.
It really looks like the U.S. is backed into a corner: It can sue for peace because of the oil tanker situation, but they do not have much leverage, or it can escalate the war. That may be why we’re seeing all these contradictory developments.
In Iran, a decapitation strike did not lead to mass uprisings. It did not lead to regime change. It led to the situation in which Iran’s regime is intact.
Trump issued an ultimatum he had to walk back from because he said there were deep peace negotiations, which then later proved to be completely fabricated.
Now, more U.S. troops are set to be deployed for a possible ground invasion in the Middle East, despite reports that the U.S. has supposedly sent a 15-point plan to Iran through Pakistan to end the war.
It almost looks as if Trump is trying to wave the peace card to keep a lid on oil futures and financial marketsjust long enough to have ground troops in position — and just in time for the markets to close for the weekend on Friday, when Trump’s “pause” on bombing Iranian power plants is set to end.
That could be the plan Trump now settles on, weeks into a deadly war where there was obviously, very clearly, no real plan at all.
Allison Detzel contributed.
Chris Hayes hosts “All In with Chris Hayes” at 8 p.m. ET Tuesday through Friday on MS NOW. He is the editor-at-large at The Nation. A former fellow at Harvard University’s Edmond J. Safra Foundation Center for Ethics, Hayes was a Bernard Schwartz Fellow at the New America Foundation. His latest book is “The Sirens’ Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource” (Penguin Press).
The Dictatorship
Jury finds Meta and YouTube liable in landmark social media trial, awards $6 million
A California state jury found Meta and YouTube liable in a landmark social media case on Wednesday, awarding $3 million in compensatory damages to a plaintiff who brought the case and putting the Instagram maker’s liability at 70% and the Google company’s at 30%.
The jurors later decided to award a total of $3 million in punitive damages, with Meta to pay $2.1 million and YouTube $900,000. The verdict was reached on the jury’s ninth day of deliberation.
A 2023 complaint accused social media companies of fueling an unprecedented mental health crisis for American children through “addictive and dangerous” products. Plaintiffs accused the companies of deliberately tweaking their products to exploit kids’ undeveloped brains to “create compulsive use of their apps.”
The civil case was brought by several plaintiffs against several companies, but this state court trial, which featured testimonyfrom Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, involved a plaintiff described by her initials as “K.G.M.” in court papers against Instagram and YouTube.
In the 2023 complaint, K.G.M. said she was a 17-year-old in California who started using social media at a much younger age, though her mother told her not to and used third-party software to try to prevent the daughter’s social media use. The complaint alleged that the corporate defendants designed their products in ways that let kids evade parental controls and that the companies knew, or should’ve known, that K.G.M. was a minor.
The plaintiff alleged that Instagram’s and other companies’ addictive designs led her to develop “a compulsion to engage with those products nonstop” and to see “harmful and depressive content, urging K.G.M. to commit acts of self-harm, as well as harmful social comparison and body image.”
She alleged that she suffered bullying, depression, anxiety and body dysmorphia through Instagram and that Meta did nothing in response to a report about it. “Meta allowed the predatory user to continue harming minor Plaintiff K.G.M., including through the use of explicit images of a minor child,” the complaint said, adding that the company’s “defective reporting mechanisms and/or deliberate failure to act caused emotional and mental health harms to K.G.M. in addition to and separate from any third-party conduct.”
The companies, which have denied wrongdoingsaid Wednesday that they plan to appeal.
Jillian Frankel contributed from Los Angeles.
Subscribe to theDeadline: Legal Newsletterfor expert analysis on the top legal stories of the week, including updates from the Supreme Court and developments in the Trump administration’s legal cases.
Jordan Rubin is the Deadline: Legal Blog writer. He was a prosecutor for the New York County District Attorney’s Office in Manhattan and is the author of “Bizarro,” a book about the secret war on synthetic drugs. Before he joined MS NOW, he was a legal reporter for Bloomberg Law.
The Dictatorship
Democrat vows to turn ‘Epstein files into Epstein trials’ after release of new depositions
The House Oversight Committee on Tuesday released hours of deposition footage from its interviews with two former close associates of Jeffrey Epsteinattorney Darren Indyke and accountant Richard Kahn. Rep. Melanie Stansbury, D-N.M., a member of the committee, joined “The Weeknight” to discuss the interviews and the efforts to hold any accomplices of the late sex offender accountable.
“What is remarkable is that even in death, his closest associates and co-conspirators are still covering for him,” Stansbury said.
During their depositions, both Indyke and Kahn insisted they had no knowledge of Epstein’s illegal behavior. The New Mexico Democrat cast doubt on those claims, taking particular issue with Indyke’s testimony, during which she said it was possible that Epstein’s former attorney may have “perjured himself.”
“He claimed that he had no knowledge of all of these nefarious activities, and yet he literally has spent decades of his life at the center of this controversy,” she said. “I’m sorry, I’m not buying it.”
Stansbury told MS NOW she believed it was important for the public to understand that both Indyke and Kahn “stand to make tens of millions of dollars off of their execution” of Epstein’s will. She added that “the way the will is structured, there is a survivor fund, and at the end of that, they get to basically keep whatever is left over.”
“We don’t know what was written into whatever contracts, but it’s clear that they have a financial interest,” she said.
Stansbury said the pair’s depositions should be part of a greater effort from lawmakers and law enforcement across the country to pursue accountability for Epstein’s victims, even after his death. She highlighted how her home state, New Mexico, was doing just that.
“That is why we are going to continue to seek justice in this case, and it’s why in New Mexico, not only did we pass a truth commission, but one of the updates that we want to tell people about is that we plan to pursue convictions against individuals who were implicated in these crimes who were not prosecuted by the federal government,” she said. “We want to turn these Epstein files into Epstein trials — and that’s exactly what we plan to do.”
You can watch Stansbury’s full interview in the clip at the top of the page.
Allison Detzel is an editor/producer for MS NOW. She was previously a segment producer for “AYMAN” and “The Mehdi Hasan Show.”
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