Thanksgiving at my son’s house in northern Armenia is not exactly the setting most people picture when they think of Middle East war coverage, but that’s where I am tonight. We just finished a big Thanksgiving dinner with about twenty-five people packed into the house. There are still games going on in the other room, kids laughing, dishes clanking, and the kind of joyful noise that reminds you what peace is supposed to feel like. I’m coming to you over Starlink from that scene, even as we track events in places where the idea of a quiet evening with family is a distant memory.
While we were clearing plates and putting away leftovers, news broke from Israel: the Israelis have received another hostage body back from Palestinian Islamic Jihad inside Gaza. This is not a live rescue, not a dramatic extraction—it is the recovery of remains. That leaves only two confirmed hostage bodies still in Gaza as of now, and Israel is still searching for them. It’s a grim reminder that beneath all the political language about “process,” “ceasefires,” and “security arrangements,” there are real families waiting on final answers about people they loved.
That development folds into a larger question: is this ceasefire still even a ceasefire at all? From where I sit, the answer looks more like “no” than “yes,” and Hamas has essentially said as much by telling U.S. envoy Steve Whitoff that the ceasefire is over. So tonight I want to walk you through what’s happening—not just in Gaza, but in Lebanon, in Judea and Samaria (the West Bank), and in the back-channel effort to create a so-called “Gaza Peace Force.” We’ll talk about why that plan is raising red flags in Israel, what Hamas was really doing in the years leading up to October 7th, and why so much of this comes back to one basic question: who do you trust with a gun, a badge, and international backing?
The Ceasefire That Never Really Was
On paper, there is a ceasefire. On the ground, there has been a pattern of violations from Hamas almost from day one. They have repeatedly crossed the yellow line they agreed not to cross, failed to return hostages and remains on schedule, launched attacks on Israeli forces, and sent surveillance drones over Israeli positions in the designated buffer zones. During this “pause,” three IDF soldiers have been killed in Gaza.
Israel has responded by continuing to neutralize threats: targeted airstrikes on known Hamas commanders, strikes on weapons caches and tunnel entrances, and increasingly aggressive efforts to eliminate the infrastructure Hamas uses to wage war. One of the most striking finds in recent weeks was a massive tunnel complex the IDF discovered and nicknamed “the Pentagon”—a seven-kilometer network approximately sixty meters underground. That’s around 150 to 200 feet deep, depending on how you convert it. This is not a crude tunnel with bare dirt walls. It is a hardened underground facility.
Inside, Israeli forces found maps of bases in Israel, training mock-ups of IDF facilities, VR simulators that allowed Hamas fighters to “walk through” Israeli bases virtually, and detailed instructions on how to disable advanced Israeli tanks by striking specific weak points—essentially a “kill switch” for the Merkava.
This did not come out of nowhere. Over at least a two-year period, Hamas built a dedicated intelligence unit of roughly 2,500 operatives who did nothing but monitor IDF soldiers online. They scraped Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, and other platforms, looking at every selfie, every background detail, every casual comment. They infiltrated WhatsApp groups used by soldiers to coordinate logistics. By geolocating photos and analyzing patterns, they were able to map out bases, routines, weapons systems, and vulnerabilities.
In other words, October 7th was not a sudden emotional outburst. It was the culmination of years of careful, patient, methodical preparation—and there is significant evidence that Iran played a key role in helping design and guide that effort. The operations orders recovered from Hamas teams inside Israel show linguistic and stylistic fingerprints consistent with Iranian planners.
So when people talk about this ceasefire as if it is a break between two good-faith actors who simply need to clarify some misunderstandings, they are living in a fantasy. Hamas has treated the pause in fighting as a recovery window: a chance to regroup, rearm, reposition fighters, and buy time. Israel, meanwhile, faces a hard reality: there are still two deceased hostages whose bodies have not been recovered, and every life—living or dead—matters to them. That moral commitment is one reason they have not simply flooded back into Gaza in full force already, but public opinion in Israel is steadily shifting toward resuming the campaign and finishing the job.
The Gaza “Peace Force” and a Bad Choice in a Bad Neighborhood
Layered on top of these military developments is a political experiment that looks very good in conference rooms in Doha and Cairo, and very bad from Jerusalem. As part of the U.S.-brokered understanding about Gaza’s future, there is supposed to be a new security and administrative force that will eventually allow Israel to pull its troops out of the Strip without leaving a power vacuum behind.
The basic idea: create a “Gaza Peace Force,” backed by the United States, Jordan, Egypt, and the EU, to handle policing, administration, and internal security in a post-Hamas Gaza.
The problem is that when you start asking, “Who exactly is going to staff this force?” the room gets very quiet.
No country is eager to send its own soldiers into Gaza. Even the Muslim-majority countries that loudly champion Gaza on the world stage do not want their troops patrolling those streets, because they understand perfectly well that it is dangerous duty with a very uncertain political upside. So into that vacuum steps the Palestinian Authority—the same PA that has been paying stipends to terrorists and their families under the “pay for slay” system for years.
The PA’s pitch is simple:
“We’ll do it. We’ll recruit and train a Palestinian police and security force to take over Gaza.”
As of now, more than 5,000 Palestinian men from Judea and Samaria have already been sent to Jordan and Egypt for police training. That’s roughly half of the total projected force size. Training is underway even as the political framework is still being debated.
From Israel’s perspective, this is a red line. The PA has not reformed its financial support for terrorism, has not changed its rhetoric about Israel’s legitimacy, and has not demonstrated that it can or will suppress extremists in its own territories, let alone in Gaza. Replacing Hamas with PA-controlled security forces looks less like “peace” and more like swapping out one brand of hostility for another—trading a fox for a tiger, as some Israelis have put it.
At the United Nations, Israeli representative Danny Danon recently laid this history out plainly. He walked through the pattern: partition proposed in 1947, Israel said yes, local Arab leaders said no and chose war; repeated peace efforts over the years, each one rejected on the Palestinian side while terror networks remained armed and subsidized. His point was simple: a leadership that refuses to disarm terrorists and continues to reward them financially is not building peace, and cannot credibly be given the keys to Gaza.
On the other side of the room, the PA’s representative, Riyad Mansour, offered a completely different narrative: accusing Israel of blocking aid, moving the yellow line to seize more territory, and trying to collapse the ceasefire in order to pursue displacement, occupation, and annexation. He described Gaza and Jerusalem as the “hearts” of Palestine and insisted that Gaza’s future would be decided entirely by Palestinians.
What he did not do was acknowledge the basic fact that the PA’s textbooks, media, and payments systems continue to glorify violence and delegitimize Israel’s existence entirely. When he says “Palestine,” he is not talking about Gaza and the West Bank alone. He is talking about all of Israel, from the river to the sea. That is the context you have to keep in mind when you hear phrases like “no occupation, no blockade, no annexation.” The vision being promoted is not two states living side by side in peace; it is one state, without Jews.
Israel, rightly, is not signing up for that.
Aid, Accusations, and the Reality on the Ground
One of the loudest claims at the UN has been that Israel is starving Gaza by holding up aid. The data simply does not support that accusation. Before this war, Gaza’s basic needs were met with somewhere around 300 aid trucks per day. At various times during the war, that number has been significantly exceeded, with hundreds more trucks per day entering the Strip. There are many problems in Gaza right now—destroyed infrastructure, displaced civilians, and of course Hamas’s entrenched military presence—but a deliberate Israeli effort to choke off food and medicine is not one of them.
In fact, you would be hard-pressed to find another war in modern history where the side that is clearly winning militarily has continued to provide large-scale humanitarian aid to the civilian population under the control of its enemy, even while actively fighting that enemy in the same space. Israel has delivered food, fuel, medicine, shelter materials, and even vaccines into a territory run by people who still openly call for its destruction. That doesn’t make every mistake disappear, but it does fundamentally undercut the narrative of a genocidal campaign.
Hamas, for its part, has turned almost every building it can into a potential threat—stuffing weapons caches, command centers, tunnel shafts, and booby-traps into residential blocks, schools, hospitals, and mosques. Faced with that reality, the IDF adopted a simple rule: if a building is wired for war, it will be treated as a battlefield target, not a protected site, because sending soldiers in to defuse every booby trap by hand is a recipe for slaughter.
It is brutal. It is tragic. And it is, under the circumstances, rational. If your entire worldview is built around hating your neighbor more than you care about building a livable society for your own children, you are not going to get to have nice things. That’s not cosmic injustice—it’s cause and effect.
A Quieter Front: Lebanon and the Campaign Against Hezbollah
While Gaza gets most of the headlines, there is another front in this war that has been steadily ticking along in the background: Lebanon.
Ever since the current ceasefire framework went into effect more than a year ago, Israel has been striking Hezbollah targets inside Lebanon on a near-daily basis. These are not massive ground invasions, but they are not symbolic pinpricks either. Israel has used airstrikes, drones, and occasional limited incursions to destroy rocket launchers, weapons depots, and senior leadership targets.
Importantly, the ceasefire arrangement was made with the Lebanese government and the United States—not with Hezbollah. Hezbollah has at various points tried to launch or prepare attacks, but many of their attempts have been pre-empted; launch sites have been destroyed before they could fire, and commanders have found themselves on the wrong end of very precise ordnance.
A few days ago, Israel struck again in Beirut’s Dahiyeh neighborhood—a Hezbollah stronghold that many residents had hoped was safe from further strikes. A precision weapon hit the fourth floor of a high-rise apartment block, killing Hezbollah’s chief of staff for southern Lebanon operations, Hayyam Ali Tabatabai (spellings vary). This man was deeply involved in coordinating Hezbollah’s rocket and drone structures with Iran’s Quds Force. Removing him from the equation is a major blow to Hezbollah’s ability to rebuild and organize.
Strategically, Israel appears to be pursuing two goals in Lebanon. First, to make it extremely difficult for Hezbollah to reconstitute the kind of offensive power it had before the current war. Second, to weaken Hezbollah to the point where the Lebanese Army—a weak institution in its own right—could conceivably have a chance at disarming or marginalizing them. In other words, Israel is not escalating for the sake of escalation; it is trying to lock in a future where Hezbollah is no longer the dominant armed actor in southern Lebanon.
Hezbollah’s options for retaliation are limited. They can attempt a symbolic missile strike, which would invite significant Israeli punishment. They can attempt some sort of cross-border infiltration, another October 7th-style attack, which is operationally difficult and likely suicidal. Or they can do nothing and try to quietly survive. The most likely option, given how badly their leadership has been gutted, is “do as little as possible and hope Israel stops hitting us.”
Who Trains the “Peacekeepers”?
Let’s come back to that Gaza Peace Force for a moment, because there is a layer to this story that you will not hear in most mainstream coverage.
We know that thousands of Palestinian recruits from Judea and Samaria are being trained in Jordan and Egypt right now. We know that the King Hussein training facility near Amman has long been a hub where U.S. troops and contractors train Jordanian and other regional security forces. And we know that the United States has been financing and facilitating the training of Palestinian Authority police officers for years, with the idea that they would keep a lid on extremists and help build “rule of law.”
That theory has not aged well. There have already been cases in which U.S.-trained Palestinian policemen, using U.S.-supplied firearms, turned those weapons on Israeli soldiers in terror attacks. The very people who were supposed to be partners for stability became attackers.
So when we hear that the new Gaza force is being trained in places where Americans are known to operate as instructors and advisors, it is reasonable to suspect that U.S. contractors may already be involved in preparing this new cadre of Palestinian security personnel. They may not be American troops in uniform, but they are working with American money, American doctrine, and often American oversight.
Is that automatically a bad thing? Not necessarily. But it does raise uncomfortable questions for American taxpayers. Do we trust the Palestinian Authority enough to keep arming and training its forces in the hope that they will restrain extremism, when we have historical proof that some of them have joined it? Is this a problem that can be solved with better police tactics, or is it fundamentally a problem of worldview and ideology—a problem that can’t be fixed with a six-week course and a graduation certificate?
If you really wanted to change the moral framework of these societies, you would send missionaries with Bibles, not just trainers with badge curricula. But that is not how Western diplomacy works these days. We keep assuming that if we build another “professionalized” force, give it patches and uniforms and human resources manuals, it will somehow produce a different outcome than the last dozen forces we trained.
Color me skeptical.
Zooming Out: America’s Role, Ukraine, and the Politics of Selective Outrage
Some of you in the comments have asked versions of the same big question: with the United States in such rough shape at home—culturally, politically, economically—do we even have any business telling other nations how to run their affairs?
It’s a fair question, but I don’t think the answer is simply “no.” America remains one of the most charitable nations on earth by any measure. Americans still give more to private charity than any other people group in the world, and our tradition of rule of law, religious participation, and civic life—though under attack—is still stronger than in many places. That doesn’t mean we are perfect or that we haven’t drifted. It does mean we still have something worth exporting: not empire, but example.
Where I think we go wrong is when we confuse handing out money with solving problems. We’ve seen clearly in recent years, including in domestic programs like SNAP, that simply sending checks does not break generational poverty or fix bad habits. It often traps people in dependency, hollowing out their dignity and initiative. The same applies abroad. Pouring billions into corrupt systems doesn’t make them less corrupt. It just raises the stakes.
This ties directly into another front that came up in our Q&A: Ukraine.
I’ve been in Ukraine repeatedly since the war started. I was on the ground when Russian missiles began falling, and I’ve spent time in the Russian-speaking regions that Moscow claims it is “liberating.” The story that Ukraine was persecuting Russian speakers and that Putin rode in to “rescue” them is fiction. The official language in Ukraine is Ukrainian; that is not persecution any more than insisting on English for U.S. government documents would be. The people I spoke to were not begging Russia to “save” them. They were simply living their lives—right up until Russian tanks rolled across their borders.
Russia recognized Ukraine’s independence decades ago, signed agreements guaranteeing its security, and then broke those promises. The war is being fought almost entirely on Ukrainian soil. Ukraine did not invade Russia to expand its territory. Russia invaded Ukraine to erase its independence. Those are the facts.
That’s why it has been so discouraging to watch the current U.S. administration flip-flop on Ukraine, cutting aid to the bare minimum and then wagging its finger about “necessary compromises.” At one point, a 28-point “peace plan” was floated that essentially demanded Ukraine surrender large chunks of territory and massively downgrade its own military. President Zelensky’s response, in essence, was that Ukraine has a choice between maintaining its dignity or clinging to a partner that no longer keeps its word. He chose dignity, and I don’t blame him.
It is painful to say this, but the way some of our leaders have treated Ukraine—misrepresenting Zelensky’s gratitude, parroting Kremlin talking points, and undermining a nation fighting for its survival—has been deeply dishonorable. I don’t think that’s because our leaders are stupid. I think it’s because they are listening to the wrong people, many of whom are more concerned with their own access and ego than with truth.
Where This Leaves Us
So where does all of this leave us tonight?
In Gaza, a “ceasefire” exists mostly on paper while Hamas uses the pause to recover and Israel continues to dismantle its war machine piece by piece. Two hostage bodies remain unrecovered, and public pressure in Israel is building to resume large-scale operations once that grim task is finished.
In Lebanon, Hezbollah is absorbing blow after blow to its leadership and infrastructure, with Israel signaling that any attempt to rebuild offensive capacity will be met with more of the same. The message is: attack us, and you will pay far more than you ever did before.
In Judea and Samaria, Palestinian Authority cadres are being trained as the nucleus of a future Gaza Peace Force—funded and in many cases trained with American help—even though the PA still funds and glorifies terror and remains committed to a vision of “Palestine” that leaves no room for Israel.
In the wider region, Iran is weakened but still dangerous, the Houthis are quieter for the moment but may reappear as a threat to shipping more than to Israel directly, and the diplomatic machinery in Doha, Cairo, Washington, and elsewhere is whirring away, trying to square circles that may not be mathematically squarable.
And back here in my son’s house in Armenia, the dishes are still clinking in the kitchen, and people are still laughing over board games. That contrast—between the messy but peaceful normalcy of family life and the brutality of what we’ve been talking about—ought to remind us what’s at stake. Free societies, even imperfect ones, are rare and fragile. They are worth defending. They are worth telling the truth for, even when that truth isn’t fashionable.
