Daily Kickoff
Good Wednesday morning.
In today’s Daily Kickoff, we look at how debate over a potential Israel-Hamas cease-fire agreement is playing out among Republicans and report on yesterday’s Senate Armed Services confirmation hearing for Pete Hegseth, the Trump administration’s nominee for defense secretary. We also report on reflections from Secretary of State Tony Blinken and antisemitism envoy Ambassador Deborah Lipstadt as they prepare to depart their postings and have the scoop on an Israeli government effort to provide support to combat Los Angeles’ wildfires. Also in today’s Daily Kickoff: Shari Redstone, Rep. Mike Waltz and Ivanka Trump.
What We’re Watching
- President Joe Biden will deliver a farewell address from the Oval Office at 8 p.m. ET today.
- Ambassador Deborah Lipstadt will hold her final Jewish community briefing this afternoon.
- There are a slew of confirmation hearings today on Capitol Hill, among them Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL), the incoming Trump administration’s nominee to be secretary of state, and John Ratcliffe, the nominee to be CIA director, who will testify this morning in front of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and Senate Intelligence Committee, respectively. Pam Bondi, President-elect Donald Trump’s pick for attorney general, and Gov. Kristi Noem, the nominee to head the Department of Homeland Security, will also be testifying today.
- Elsewhere on the Hill, Democrats will choose the leaders of the subcommittees of the House Foreign Affairs Committee.
What You Should Know
President-elect Donald Trump loves a deal. But at what cost?
That’s the question being asked in political and diplomatic circles as negotiators in Qatar edge closer to a cease-fire and hostage-release agreement between Israel and Hamas, with days to go before Trump’s inauguration.
The exact parameters of the deal are still being negotiated, but its initial stage will likely see 33 hostages released over a six-week period, in exchange for as many as 1,000 Palestinian prisoners, including dozens serving life sentences.
Trump has warned Hamas there will be “hell to pay” if all the hostages aren’t released by the time he takes office. But under the outline of the emerging deal, that goal will be far from accomplished, with hostages being released over a monthslong period. Adding to the anxiety in pro-Israel circles is Trump’s latest threat that “there will be a lot of trouble” if a deal isn’t reached, even one that could involve painful concessions from Israel. Those comments sounded like they were directed as much toward Israel as Hamas.
Meanwhile, Trump’s Mideast envoy, Steve Witkoff, is zipping around the region holding meetings with key stakeholders (including a rare Shabbat meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu) and issuing his own warnings on the need to reach an agreement.
The purported deal — and Trump’s push for an agreement to be reached before Inauguration Day — has divided the foreign policy establishment and Capitol Hill.
Within Israel, more than half the country supports an agreement that secures the release of the remaining 98 hostages in exchange for Hamas’ demands to end the war — a survey conducted last week by the Israel Democracy Institute (IDI) and released last night found 58% of respondents were in favor of such an agreement. Even as Netanyahu has been seen at times as a roadblock to a final agreement, that he is willing to cross the finish line with this deal as Jan. 20 nears underscores the degree to which pressure from Trump as well as a national exhaustion in Israel after 467 days of war are factoring in to the decision-making process.
The deal sets back one of the Israeli government’s key war aims: “total victory” over Hamas. By leaving the terror group hobbled but still intact, the threat remains. Adding to that concern, Secretary of State Tony Blinken said yesterday that U.S. intelligence estimates that Hamas has recruited approximately the number of members that it has lost since the start of the war. (More on that below.) Israeli officials dispute this, and others say that the recruitment effort is dulled by Hamas’ lack of resources, training and senior leadership.
The emerging deal is putting some pro-Israel Trump supporters who were vocal critics of President Joe Biden’s diplomacy in an uncomfortable position. The deal that Trump is championing, at first glance, has the same parameters as the one Biden outlined over the summer — even Israel’s cabinet secretary, Yossi Fuchs, acknowledged it’s the same deal as the one negotiated in May.
But that was before Hamas executed six hostages and before the bodies of other hostages who survived the Oct.7 attack were found, underscoring a new urgency in the effort to secure the release of the remaining hostages. And it was also before Israel killed the top echelon of Hamas leadership, including Oct. 7 mastermind Yahya Sinwar, which also complicated negotiation efforts by leaving no sole decision-maker in charge of Hamas’ role in the talks.
The deal includes vague “security mechanisms” in the key Philadelphi and Netzarim corridors. Israeli officials briefing the media would not detail how the mechanisms would keep arms from being smuggled into Gaza from Egypt and from southern to northern Gaza. When Jewish Insider asked if Israel would oversee the arrangements, the officials said the matter was still under negotiation.
With the decapitation of Hezbollah, the fall of the Assad regime in Syria and the degradation of Iran’s air-defense systems, Israel is in a stronger position than it was last summer. What Hamas leadership has survived largely exists outside of the Gaza Strip, and even they have been forced to reportedly relocate and shuffle between Qatar and Turkey. All of that has left Hamas open to accepting a deal quite similar to the one it rejected last year.
But it’s looking like Trump is potentially more concerned with making a deal for the sake of promoting a deal. Details of the deal are being received skeptically in private by many Republican lawmakers, but if history is any indication, most will publicly hold the line for Trump.
The big question going forward is what Trump’s approach to Israel will be in his second term. Will Trump, ever the deal-maker, look to strike his own nuclear deal with Iran, instead of backing efforts to take out the Islamic regime’s nuclear program militarily now that Iran’s air defense has been severely diminished, as many hawks have advocated? Or will Israel receive other benefits and security guarantees in exchange for making some of the painful concessions outlined in the hostage deal?
Time will tell. Most of Trump’s foreign policy team are strong backers of Israel and support a muscular approach in dealing with the threats in the region. But if Trump’s zest for dealmaking ends up trumping Israel’s security needs, many Republicans may be forced to choose between holding onto their principles or surrendering some of them at the knee of politics.
deal disagreement
Republican lawmakers raise concerns about contours of Israel-Hamas hostage deal

Despite President-elect Donald Trump’s push for a deal to secure the release of the remaining hostages in Gaza before his inauguration, some Republicans are raising concerns that the terms of the agreement currently being negotiated could hurt Israel’s ability to defend itself and eliminate future terrorist threats, Jewish Insider’s Emily Jacobs reports. Behind the scenes, congressional Republicans have begun fretting that Trump could force them to back a deal that involves terms they’ve opposed for over a year.
Reservations: Some lawmakers and senior staffers have privately discussed the issue among themselves, though none of them have taken additional steps beyond engaging with Trump’s transition team about their concerns. Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC) said that he was “really in the skeptical column for anything related to Hamas.” Tillis expressed concern that the terror organization was included in negotiations at all. “I feel like they’re the wrong people to be brokering the deal because, in some respects, that means you’re a part of the future of Gaza. That’s a bad thing,” Tillis told JI.
Read the full story here with additional comments from Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) and Sens. John Cornyn (R-TX), Rick Scott (R-FL), Pete Ricketts (R-NE), Ted Cruz (R-TX) and John Kennedy (R-LA).
On the Mike: Rep. Mike Waltz (R-FL), the Trump administration’s incoming national security advisor, addressed the emerging hostage deal on Dan Senor’s “Call Me Back” podcast Tuesday night, Jewish Insider’s Haley Cohen reports. “Those have been brutally tough negotiations. I hate the fact that we even have to enter them, into them, with a terrorist group like Hamas, but we need to get our people out and then prosecute our objectives in this conflict,” Waltz said.