It's Wednesday, October 15th, 2025 from Peach Fish Productions.

It's the gist.

I'm Mike Peska.

How to read diplomatic reporting trying to figure out how this Hamas deal, this Israel Hamas hostage

deal went down.

New York Times today.

Actual paper wasn't an actual paper. Wouldn't sound like this.

Ultimately, the two sides more or less split the difference, Arab officials said.

Israel would hold on to much more territory than Hamas wanted it to, but it would pull out of many built-up areas.

Hamas grudgingly accepted the compromise, meaning Hamas gleefully accepted the compromise.

Does grudging acceptance characterize anything that you know about Hamas later on in the story?

There is this quote from Steve Whitkoff, which gets exactly at the main question I've been having,

which is, why would Hamas give up the hostages? That was the

only leverage they had. But Whitkoff is saying they were almost looking at the hostages less as an

asset and more as a liability. So allowing for the fact that Whitkoff might be exaggerating or

misreading things or just lying to us in the

press for some reason, it's beginning to be clear that the hostages were not this shit,

this Trump card, no pun intended, this shield, they were, in fact, a magnet.

Which gets us a little further down in questioning the idea that this was

a genocide, the intention of Israel was a genocide. This gets us to reexamine that precept, because

if it was a genocide, what would the stated claim of getting the hostages? How would that play into their real

aim, which was a genocide? And remember, in order to find something a genocide, it has to be

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