Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-WA), the former chair of the House Progressive Caucus who has been a leading supporter of efforts to block weapons sales to Israel, is set to join the influential House Foreign Affairs Committee, House Democratic leadership announced on Tuesday.

Jayapal will join Reps. George Latimer (D-NY), Johnny Olszewski (D-MD), Julie Johnson (D-TX) and Sarah McBride (D-DE) as the new Democratic members of the key House committee.

In his final major address on Middle East policy, Secretary of State Tony Blinken on Tuesday outlined the Biden administration’s vision for Gaza after the war between Israel and Hamas ends — while negotiators in Qatar rushed to finalize the terms of a cease-fire and hostage-release deal that has not yet been signed.

“I believe we will get a cease-fire,” Blinken said at the Atlantic Council, stating it could come in the final days of the Biden administration or the early days of President-elect Donald Trump’s term. “From the outset, we also recognized that we couldn’t afford to wait until a cease-fire to plan for what would follow it.”

Shari Redstone, the chair of CBS parent company Paramount Global, expressed satisfaction with the appointment of Susan Zirinsky as interim executive editor of CBS News on Monday — after the media mogul publicly criticized the network’s leadership last fall for its handling of internal divisions over its Israel coverage.

“I am pleased that CBS News recognized the need to take action to deliver consistently balanced and fair coverage,” Redstone said in an exclusive statement to Jewish Insider on Tuesday. “We are fortunate that Susan Zirinsky has stepped into this critical new role on an interim basis. With her exceptional experience, I am confident she can move quickly towards ensuring the highest standards in reporting as the search continues for a permanent executive editor.”

Ruby Chen, the father of a U.S.-Israeli hostage who was killed on Oct. 7, is fearful that the developing hostage-release and cease-fire deal will not bring back all of the 98 hostages still held in Gaza.

In an interview with Jewish Insider on Tuesday morning, following a visit he and his wife, Hagit, made to Doha, Qatar, over the weekend to meet with U.S. and Qatari officials, Chen, who did not learn until March 2024 that his son Itay had been killed on Oct. 7, said, “We see the list [of hostages reportedly set to be released]. We see what’s being materialized … We have deep concerns that our son will be left behind [for] an unknown period of time.” 

President-elect Donald Trump’s National Security Council team has in recent days finalized several additional picks, including David Feith, Walker Barrett and Thomas Boodry, in the lead-up to next week’s inauguration.

Feith, a former deputy assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific Affairs, will join the NSC team, a source familiar with the pick told Jewish Insider, as will Barrett, currently a House Armed Services Committee staffer and alum of incoming National Security Advisor Mike Waltz’s congressional office, and Boodry, currently a staffer in Waltz’s House office, another source told JI.

Next week in Las Vegas, thousands of LGBTQ activists will gather for the annual Creating Change conference, a major confab hosted by the National LGBTQ Task Force. The driving value for the event’s organizers, according to the conference website, is “radical welcome: love, curiosity and respect for each other and our LGBTQ family.”

But the gathering has already drawn controversy for being unwelcoming to some attendees, with one planned session — a meeting of queer Middle Eastern and North African (MENA) attendees — explicitly defining itself as a “Zionism-free space.” (Ironically, the description of the event says it welcomes “queer individuals from diverse MENA backgrounds,” including “Mizrahi” people, which is a Hebrew word used in Israel to describe Jews from Middle Eastern and North African nations.)

CBS News is facing renewed accusations of anti-Israel bias over a “60 Minutes” segment criticizing the Biden administration’s handling of the war in Gaza that relies largely on two former State Department officials with ties to the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), whose executive director has drawn condemnation from the White House for praising Hamas.

The new segment, which aired on Sunday, appeared highly skeptical of Israel’s war against Hamas in the wake of the Oct. 7 attacks — drawing almost exclusively on interviews with two disgruntled former officials who resigned from the State Department in protest of President Joe Biden’s support for Israel amid the ongoing conflict.

A bipartisan group of lawmakers representing the New York and New Jersey areas urged the Department of Transportation and Federal Aviation Administration on Monday to expedite consideration of any applications from Israeli airlines to begin flights between Tel Aviv and JFK or Newark Liberty airports, as U.S. carriers have kept their flights suspended.

“While our strong preference would be for U.S. carriers to resume their service from the greater New York City area airports that serve our districts, unfortunately, these airlines continue to extend suspensions of their service to TLV,” the lawmakers said. “In the absence of U.S. carriers flying this critical route for our constituents, we strongly support additional Israeli carriers providing service between these two deeply connected communities to provide competition and lower customer prices.”