Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) expressed skepticism on Monday that Hamas will comply with disarmament requirements in its U.S.-backed ceasefire agreement with Israel, saying that finishing off the terrorist group may require further confrontation from Israel. 

“To expect Hamas to disarm without the threat of confrontation is unrealistic,” Graham wrote in a post on X. “Therefore, it is my growing belief that Hamas is not going to disarm but instead is in the process of consolidating power in Gaza by attacking those who oppose them.” 

Few Republican lawmakers have thus far questioned if President Donald Trump’s 20-point peace plan — which has brought all the living hostages back to Israel — will be sufficient to take Hamas out of power in Gaza. 

“Under the current approach, every day that goes by allows Hamas to get stronger and more lethal,” said Graham. “The world needs to understand that Israel cannot tolerate this outcome. If Israel feels it needs to reengage in Gaza to finish Hamas off, they have my full support.”

Israel currently controls 58% of Gaza, marked by a yellow “initial withdrawal line,” while Hamas maintains a presence in the western part of the enclave. The terrorist group has failed to disarm or relinquish power yet, as indicated in Phase 1 of Trump’s proposal, instead mobilizing more fighters and clashing with rival Palestinian gangs. 

Phase 2 Trump’s plan envisions an International Stabilization Force, comprised of troops from mediating countries, to stabilize the Gaza Strip. However, several leaders have indicated they have  little appetite to participate, including the King of Jordan, who told the BBC “nobody will want to touch” peace enforcing.

“I completely agree with the King of Jordan’s analysis regarding what it takes to stabilize the Gaza strip,” Graham said on X. “To expect an international force to go to war with Hamas to require their disarmament is unrealistic.”

With Trump’s plan at a standstill, experts say a new strategy may be required in Gaza.  

“If Hamas refuses to disarm and no international force steps forward that is prepared to do the hard work of forcibly disarming it, why should the world grant Hamas a total veto over positive movement on the rest of Trump’s 20-point plan?” John Hannah, a senior fellow at the Jewish Institute for National Security of America, told Jewish Insider. “There’s no doubt that both in Israel and the United States there is active discussion of how to take advantage of this.”

Vice President JD Vance’s suggestion on Tuesday that the U.S. would welcome Turkish troops playing a role in the proposed stabilization force in Gaza was met with skepticism from leading Republican lawmakers and experts in Washington. 

Vance told reporters in Israel that while the U.S. would not “force” Israel to accept Turkish troops “on their soil,” the Trump administration believed “that there’s a constructive role for the Turks to play.” 

Asked about the prospect of Ankara’s involvement in President Donald Trump’s peace plan for the region while appearing alongside Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu the next day, the vice president replied that the U.S. does not view Israel as a “vassal state” or a “client state” but as a “partner.”

“The president believes very strongly that … Israel, honestly with our Gulf Arab allies, can play a very positive leadership role in this region to where, frankly, the United States can care less about the Middle East because our allies in the region are stepping up and taking control and taking ownership of their area of the world,” Vance said.

The vice president made the comments in response to Netanyahu suggesting that he took issue with the notion of Turkey playing a role in the future of Gaza. “We will decide together about that. So I have very strong opinions on that. Want to guess what they are?” the prime minister quipped. 

Vance’s embrace of the Turkish troop proposal prompted leading Republicans in Washington to voice their concerns about allowing the country to install forces inside Gaza as part of the proposed International Stabilization Force, citing Israel’s opposition to the idea, Turkey’s openly hostile posture toward the Jewish state and Ankara’s ties to Hamas. 

“I found it interesting that the opposition leader, Mr. [Yair] Lapid, who I know and like, was adamant that Turkey and Qatar have very limited roles in Gaza because of the relationship with Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood,” Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) told Jewish Insider. 

“I appreciate Turkey and Qatar as allies, but when it comes to Israel, [Turkish President Recep Tayyip] Erdogan’s been terrible in terms of rhetoric. I appreciate the role they played in trying to get the ceasefire, but the appetite in Israel for Turkey and Qatar to have a major role is pretty limited, given the history,” he continued. 

Graham said that he was “hoping we can find a stabilizing force. People keep mentioning Egypt. Maybe that works, but I don’t buy into the idea Hamas will ever change their stripes. They have to be dealt out of Palestinian society.”

“It’s very important for Israel to have a stabilizing force that they trust that understands the danger Hamas presents,” the South Carolina senator argued.

Jonathan Ruhe, a fellow for American strategy at the Jewish Institute for National Security of America, expressed similar doubts. 

“There’s a million reasons why it won’t be viable to have a long term Israeli military presence on the ground in Gaza. But the same goes for Arab partners,” Ruhe told JI. “Having Turkish forces in there particularly strikes me as a bad idea. Turkey is not an impartial force. They are a capable and experienced military, but mostly doing things the United States and Israel don’t want them to be doing.” 

“Turkey does not deserve anything like the benefit of the doubt. Their intentions are certainly suspect given their close ties to Hamas. Having a Turkish military presence literally on [Israel’s] front doorstep in Gaza could actually be worse,” Ruhe continued. “I wouldn’t see them doing anything concrete and substantive to prevent Hamas from basically reestablishing itself as the main actor on the ground in Gaza.”

Beyond a potential incapability to root out Hamas, Ruhe suggested that enabling Turkish troop presence in Gaza could be counterintuitive to U.S. interests in other ways. 

“Hamas might actually find it in their interest to try and stoke tensions between Turkey and Israel. That would be a massive headache for the U.S., having, technically, a NATO ally at daggers drawn with our closest partner in the Middle East,” Ruhe said.  

One senior GOP senator offered a blunt assessment while speaking on condition of anonymity about Vance’s comments. “They’re pushing Israel into a terrible situation. Turkey and Qatar are the benefactors of Hamas. It’s like putting a fox in the henhouse,” the senator said.

Sen. Mike Rounds (R-SD) did not disagree with Vance’s suggestion that Turkey had a role to play in the broader peace plan, but questioned the likelihood that Israel would accept such a proposal.

“Would Israel accept Turkish forces? That, I think, is the key. I think that’s the most important part of this,” Rounds told JI. “I do think our ally, our NATO ally, Turkey, could play a very constructive role in the Middle East in terms of keeping the peace, but that’s not an easy thing to do because Turkey and Israel have had strained relations.”

As the Trump administration ratchets up its efforts to influence higher education, the latest White House proposal for colleges and universities is being met with skepticism from academics — even as its authors say its implementation should be a no-brainer.

That’s in reference to a White House document called the “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education,” a 10-point plan that the federal government is asking universities to sign in order to get preferential treatment for the federal funds upon which many research universities rely. 

If the schools don’t agree to the terms in the compact — which include commitments to end race-based hiring and admissions, limits on foreign enrollment and a pledge to foster greater ideological diversity — they risk losing billions of dollars.

The compact reflects an evolution of a familiar Trump administration argument: that America’s preeminent educational institutions have strayed from their mission, letting politics interfere with their raison d’etre as centers of academic excellence. Combating antisemitism on college campuses — a cause the White House has prioritized this year — provided President Donald Trump a foray into greater oversight of higher education. But there appears to be no direct line from that fight against antisemitism to the broader ideological framework in this compact, which makes only a passing reference to antisemitism.

A White House official who worked on the compact called it a “basic, basic easy low hurdle,” telling Jewish Insider that the document is “a nonpartisan, neutral concept.” 

Many academics, including several who have spoken out against antisemitism and against universities’ handling of it in recent years, don’t agree. 

“Fundamentally, the premise of the document is inconsistent with our core belief that scientific funding should be based on scientific merit alone,” Massachusetts Institute of Technology President Sally Kornbluth said last week, making MIT the first university to formally reject the compact. 

The White House wrote to MIT and eight other campuses this month, giving them early access. Brown University joined MIT in rejecting the compact on Wednesday, but the other seven universities haven’t yet responded ahead of the Oct. 20 deadline. 

With the compact, Trump is making the case that universities have a fiduciary responsibility to American citizens that they have not met, as academia has “lost its way,” according to the administration official. 

“It’s for the taxpayers,” said the official, who requested anonymity to speak openly about a negotiating process that is mostly taking place behind closed doors. “This administration is here to support research … but at the same time we also can’t abdicate our responsibility to you and myself. There are a lot of people who are cutting checks to the IRS because that’s what they have to do, and they don’t even go to college.” 

But where the Trump administration sees “good hygiene,” according to the official, many academics worry the compact’s far-reaching goals could amount to an overreach that impinges on free speech and academic freedom.

“It’s something that everybody’s talking about, and people are taking it very seriously,” said David Myers, a professor and the chair of Jewish history at the University of California, Los Angeles. “It really seems to touch upon one of the cardinal principles of university governance, which is autonomy and independence.” 

Menachem Rosensaft, an adjunct law professor who teaches about antisemitism and the Holocaust at Cornell University, called the compact “overkill, with a number of positive items in it, but overall problematic for any independent university of college.” 

Rosensaft questioned how the compact addresses antisemitism, if at all: Antisemitism is only mentioned in a section about foreign students, which accuses those who are “not properly vetted” with “saturating the campus with noxious values such as antisemitism and other anti-American values.”

Academics concerned about antisemitism told JI that the Trump administration is right to point out that severe problems exist in higher education. But many are unsure how this compact will address the issues Jewish students face. 

“I often wonder if a compact like this had come out of the Biden administration or a Harris administration, whether, from the faculty, there’d be that same kind of knee-jerk reaction [that] we have to oppose everything that comes out of the administration — when actually, when you read this line by line, there’s a lot of things we can agree with,” said Miriam Elman, a former political science professor at Syracuse University. 

“If you look at certain things individually, they’re OK. I don’t have any problem with freezing tuition, for example, or with arresting grade inflation. I don’t have any problem with teaching [Western civilization]. The problem is that, as a whole package, it’s kind of the antithesis of what universities are meant to do,” said Norman Goda, a historian and professor of Holocaust studies at the University of Florida. “And if the addressing of antisemitism is one of the aims of this, then I don’t know how that is done.”

Miriam Elman, a former political science professor at Syracuse University, said that some of the immediate skepticism of the compact is likely due to politics. But that doesn’t alleviate all of her concerns.

“I often wonder if a compact like this had come out of the Biden administration or a Harris administration, whether, from the faculty, there’d be that same kind of knee-jerk reaction [that] we have to oppose everything that comes out of the administration — when actually, when you read this line by line, there’s a lot of things we can agree with,” said Elman, who is the executive director of the Academic Engagement Network, which fights academic boycotts of Israel. 

“But we also are not naive. The Trump administration does have an agenda. It does have priorities, and it is wrapping those priorities into the fight against campus antisemitism. So there is a lot of concern.” 

The compact appears to be primarily directed at undergraduate programs. Dr. Philip Greenland, a professor of medicine at Northwestern University, said his colleagues at the medical school are generally not worried about the compact in the way many humanities professors are. “It could affect the medical school in a secondary way: If Northwestern is drawn into this and doesn’t comply, we may never get our federal funding back,” said Greenland. The Trump administration froze $790 million in federal funding for Northwestern in April. 

“Although the compact doesn’t seem to be talking about antisemitism, in the end, people will remember: How did the administration go after the universities?” said Pamela Nadell, the chair in women’s and gender history at American University and the author of a new book about antisemitism in America. “They said that they were promoting antisemitism.”

“I think it’s in some sense a good thing that it doesn’t call out, specifically, that this is about antisemitism,” Greenland continued. “What the compact seems to be more about is a claim, which is justifiable, that universities have become very, very ideological in one direction … People are claiming that the compact will deprive them of their free speech. But what that doesn’t recognize is that the current situation deprives other people of their free speech and their free expression.” 

The Trump administration official told JI that the compact is “all-encompassing,” and argued that its broad mandate includes antisemitism — but not only that.

“It overlaps, but the compact isn’t a compact to stop antisemitism. It’s a compact to return to lawful academic excellence and a marketplace of ideas, [and] that includes eradicating antisemitism,” said the official. 

Pamela Nadell, the chair in women’s and gender history at American University and the author of a new book about antisemitism in America, argued that the Trump administration’s earlier actions targeting antisemitism will come to be viewed as the pretext for what is now a much larger and more strategic rewriting of federal policy toward institutions of higher education. 

“Although the compact doesn’t seem to be talking about antisemitism, in the end, people will remember: How did the administration go after the universities?” said Nadell. “They said that they were promoting antisemitism.”

ASPEN, Colo. — Sen. Chris Coons (D-DE) said Friday that the U.S. strikes on Iran could ultimately produce a positive outcome, a softening of the Delaware senator’s previous skepticism.

“The strike on Iran is one that I disagreed with because of the process, the lack of consultation with Congress, the partisan way that Republicans were notified at the most senior levels [and]Democrats were not,” Coons said at the Aspen Security Forum.

He said he also had not expected that the administration would be able to avoid significant Iranian retaliation and an escalating conflict.

“I frankly, did not believe that we would end up in the period we seem to be in where a counter-strike by Iran against American soldiers and interests has not yet come,” Coons continued.

But, he said, “if it actually ends up securing a movement towards regional peace and really knocking down Iran’s nuclear enrichment program, it’s a good thing. I mean, having Iran on its back foot and having the Iranian enrichment progress halted is something I’m not going to criticize.”

Coons added that he is concerned that the administration lacks a clear plan for the path forward or the commitment to sustain pressure on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to end the war in Gaza and pursue “Saudi-Israeli-Palestinian reconciliation and recognition.”

Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA), speaking alongside Coons, argued that President Donald Trump had overplayed the strikes’ effectiveness and missed the opportunity to capitalize on them.

“I would also grant on the Iran strike that I had the same concerns, and I was Gang of Eight and did not get told,” Warner said, referring to the group of eight senior congressional leaders who are traditionally briefed on important intelligence matters by the executive branch. “In [Trump’s] effort to claim total credit, he turned something that was a success, but by saying within two hours ‘total obliteration’ when we didn’t even try to fully take out all the enriched uranium [storage] sites set a standard that was too high.”

“Setting Iran back dramatically was important,” Warner said. “But then you had everybody trying to kowtow to this level that is unattainable unless you have troops on the ground.”

He said the only way to ensure Iran’s nuclear program won’t continue is to reach a deal to allow nuclear inspectors back into the country, and that he expected Trump was pursuing that path after the strikes, but “it feels like that moment has already passed.”

The two Democratic senators also spoke about their concerns about the upcoming 2026 appropriations process, and Office of Management and Budget Director Russ Vought’s recently reported comments that he wanted to see the process be less bipartisan. They raised concerns that Republicans would seek to walk back bipartisan appropriations deals through recissions down the road.

Warner, the vice chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, railed against Director of National Intelligence Tusli Gabbard as untrustworthy and “not competent,” accusing her of politicizing the intelligence community and mishandling classified information. He said he believes that close intelligence partners are curtailing their information-sharing with the U.S. due to concerns about Gabbard and the Trump administration.

Addressing the Signalgate scandal, when top administration officials discussed operational plans against the Houthis in Yemen on an unsecured private messaging app, Warner said “the Israeli government was extraordinarily upset” about the incident.