Is the War Over?

Plus: Zohran Mamdani's bus plan makes no sense, Kristi Noem's description of antifa makes no sense, and more...

All hostages will be returned: This week marked two years since the October 7 terrorist attack in which Hamas slaughtered 1,200 Israelis and took 251 of them hostage. Since then, Israel has waged war in Gaza, displacing nearly 2 million people in an effort to avenge the deaths, return the remaining hostages, and stamp out those responsible for the attack.

Now, President Donald Trump says he has brokered a deal between the terrorist group Hamas and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, bringing an end to the war. Some 20 living hostages will be released, along with the bodies of 28 who were killed, returning all hostages to Israel. They will be swapped for Palestinian prisoners, and the hostages are expected to be released on Monday. The United States will play a role in the rebuilding process. Trump says he will travel to the Middle East this weekend to continue to oversee the early stages of the peace process. Netanyahu is convening his cabinet today to sign off on the deal, though the full text has not yet been released.

"I am very proud to announce that Israel and Hamas have both signed off on the first Phase of our Peace Plan," wrote Trump on Truth Social. "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. All Parties will be treated fairly! This is a GREAT Day for the Arab and Muslim World, Israel, all surrounding Nations, and the United States of America, and we thank the mediators from Qatar, Egypt, and Turkey, who worked with us to make this Historic and Unprecedented Event happen. BLESSED ARE THE PEACEMAKERS!" (Nobel Peace Prize winners are announced this week, and Trump may be jockeying for one. Incentives matter, I suppose. But the motivations are also probably deeper than that.)

"Israel's Sept. 9 strike targeting Hamas representatives in Qatar motivated an angry Mr. Trump and his advisers to push Mr. Netanyahu to supporting a framework for ending the war, which Mr. Trump unveiled late last month," reports The New York Times. "This cease-fire and hostage release, if it happens, only came to fruition because of Trump's willingness to pressure Prime Minister Netanyahu," Carnegie Endowment for International Peace's Aaron David Miller told the Times, adding that "no president, Republican or Democrat, has ever come down harder on an Israeli prime minister on issues so critically important to his politics or his country's security interests."

Some of Trump's motivation here might also be that his signature first-term foreign policy accomplishment was the Abraham Accords, which normalized relations between Israel and the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain. Sudan and Morocco joined later. (Hamas' attack on Israel is believed to be at least partially due to fears that more Arab nations, especially Saudi Arabia, would further normalize relations with Israel; the terrorist attack and subsequent war put Abraham Accords progress on hold.)

The first phase of the deal will mandate that the Israeli military retract its troops to certain boundaries in Gaza. The Israeli military affirmed this, saying it would "transition to adjusted deployment lines soon." Hamas says it expects Trump to make Israel "fully implement the agreement's requirements and not allow it to evade or delay."

We still don't know who leads Gaza in the aftermath of the war—Hamas governs it, after all—and what types of ongoing surveillance or monitoring of Hamas will be permitted to ensure it doesn't regain strength. Hamas and Netanyahu have generally been at crosshairs when it comes to Netanyahu's expectation that Hamas fully disarm, so that must still be sorted out. The specific phases and timelines have not yet been released.

"The mediators announce that tonight an agreement was reached on all the provisions and implementation mechanisms of the first phase of the Gaza ceasefire agreement, which will lead to ending the war, the release of Israeli hostages and Palestinian prisoners, and the entry of aid. The details will be announced later," wrote Majed al-Ansari, Qatar's Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesman, on X.

A big-picture take in plain English:

I'm wary of course but it sure seems like a STRONG ISRAEL WITH STRONG BACKING FROM AN UNPREDICTABLE KINDA PSYCHO U.S. PRESIDENT with B2 bombers is a better basis for changing the Middle East game than the UN bitching at Jews.

— Mary Katharine Ham (@mkhammer) October 8, 2025

If this sticks—and that's a big if—this will be one of, if not the, signature Trump accomplishment of this term. Brokering peace is a huge deal. It's a war that has killed 67,000 Palestinians—though the Gazan data collectors do not distinguish between militants and civilians, and even the under-18 count is unreliable, as many Hamas fighters are teenagers. Children have been blown to smithereens. Hundreds of thousands have starved. Israelis live in a constant state of vigilance, wondering whether Hamas terrorists will breach their borders again and attempt another massacre. For Trump to be able to successfully bring peace to this region would be enormous—and a further sign that he is gifted at masterminding foreign policy and persuading the most irascible world leaders.

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Scenes from New York: "On Wednesday, Mr. [Zohran] Mamdani, the Democratic nominee [for mayor], rode the full route of the M57, a crosstown bus that traverses Midtown Manhattan and is one of the city's slowest, to remind New Yorkers that he wanted to speed up their commutes," reports The New York Times. (One of Mamdani's platform planks is that he wants city buses to be "fast and free.") The bus arrived at the end of the line 25 minutes late, proving his point, but not that his solutions will work.

Mamdani hopes to build more dedicated bus lanes and for the city to do a better job of restricting local car traffic in certain areas to get buses moving faster. (Cars already routinely drive in bus lanes, so it's not totally clear that Mamdani's solution would actually make a difference.) As for the "free" part, 48 percent of riders already don't pay their fares, so I'm not sure cost is super prohibitive for many people. (Before the pandemic, it was more like 20 percent of riders refusing to pay their fares.) It's kind of insane that, given the Metropolitan Transit Authority's $315 million revenue hole from missed bus fares, Mamdani isn't interested in fixing this huge problem, but rather smashing the whole system, assuming the city's overtaxed rich will simply pay for all his budget proposals.

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QUICK HITS

• Ohio state Reps. Gary Click (R–Fremont)and Mike Dovilla (R–Strongsville) have introduced House Bill 486, stupidly termed "the Charlie Kirk American Heritage Act." The actual bill is…pretty decent, not nearly as bad as it sounds. "This legislation allows Ohio's educators, when teaching American history, to include instruction on the positive influence of religion—particularly Christianity—on the development of our nation's ideals, its civic institutions, and its culture," said Dovilla. "This is not about rewriting history. It is about restoring honesty and depth to the way we teach it." Click added: "The United States stands alone in history, in the history of nations, through the overwhelming influence of Christianity on our founding." He said they introduced it in response to teachers reporting that they felt as though accurate teaching on the role of Christianity at the founding might lead to accusations of proselytizing, and the authors of the bill stressed that this is supposed to be a permissive measure allowing for more speech, not a restrictive measure that attempts to force teachers to teach in any one particular way.
• "In May, officials from the US and Eswatini signed a deal that allows the Trump administration to deport people from all over the world to the African nation. A copy of the arrangement I reviewed shows that the United States has agreed to pay Eswatini $5.1 million to take in up to 160 so-called 'third-country nationals'—immigrants who came to the US with no ties to the country to which they are being deported," reports Mother Jones. (Why Eswatini? It's Africa's last absolute monarchy; it is "untroubled by democracy," with few due process protections.)
• This is just patently false, the idea that antifa is somehow just as organized and fearsome and "sophisticated" as Hamas, Tren de Aragua, MS-13, ISIS, or Hezbollah. I hate the black bloc fuckers just as much, if not more, than the next guy, but they are not an organized terrorist group that's kidnapping people, murdering them, spreading videos of beheadings, or able to amass substantial political power. Comparing antifa with those others massively overstates the group's power, influence, and competence, and we should instead accurately describe threats. (They're not even on Weather Underground's level, at present.)

Noem: "We are hoping…we will get more and more information about the network and how we can route them out and eliminate them from the existence of American society…Antifa is just as sophisticated as MS-13, as TDA, as ISIS, as Hezbollah, as Hamas, as all of them. They are just… pic.twitter.com/l1hBzviFXg

— The Bulwark (@BulwarkOnline) October 8, 2025

• Lol

Question: Have you given any more thought to suspending habeas corpus?

Trump: Suspending who? pic.twitter.com/TLAJnAEItQ

— Acyn (@Acyn) October 8, 2025