Hamas Returns All Israeli Hostages, Israel Continues Palestinian Torment With Unexpected Prisoner Deportations – The Tuesday AM Quickie 10/14/25
More No Kings protests are happening in every state this Saturday and organizers told me they’re expecting even bigger crowds than last time. - Whitney
ON THE SHOW TODAY
10/14: Today’s guests are Mouin Rabbani, nonresident senior fellow at the Middle East Council on Global Affairs. He is a researcher, analyst, and commentator specializing in Palestinian affairs, the Arab-Israeli conflict, and contemporary Middle East issues; and Quickie emeritus writer Jacob Silverman, an independent journalist in New York on to discuss his new book Gilded Rage: Elon Musk and the Radicalization of Silicon Valley and the podcast companion The Making of Musk: Understood.
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Today you’ll read about Israel’s deportation of scores of Palestinian prisoners instead of releasing them to their families as promised, the irreversible climate tipping point marked by the death of certain types of coral reefs, and the shocking news, shocking, I say, that Americans are footing the bill for Trump’s tariffs.
THE BIG NEWS
Hamas Returns All Israeli Hostages, Israel Continues Palestinian Torment With Unexpected Prisoner Deportations
Families of Israeli hostages rejoiced yesterday as Hamas released all 20 as part of a peace agreement brokered by Egypt, Qatar, Turkey and the US, the AP, The Guardian and the NYT reported. By Monday morning, Hamas had notified Israel that it would return the remains of four of the 28 deceased hostages later in the day; a military spokesman said, “We demand that Hamas uphold their part of the agreement. We do not forget them for a moment; we will not rest until they all reach their families and are laid to rest in Israel.”
The rules, however, are different for Israel, which continues to find new ways to torment Palestinians. Multiple news agencies reported that the US-backed rogue nation freed nearly 2,000 Palestinian prisoners. But Israel is forcing scores of them into exile, a shock for their family members, whom Israeli officials had not told about the deportations, Al Jazeera reported. According to Drop Site News, the total number of Palestinian prisoners set to be released was 1,986, including 1,718 detained after Oct. 7, 2023. Two hundred and fifty prisoners were people serving long-term or life sentences; Israel exiled 154 people in that group to Egypt. Officials released 88 in the occupied West Bank and Jerusalem and eight in Gaza. In some cases, the deportations will make it “virtually impossible for families to see their loved ones again,” The Guardian reported. As other families celebrated the return of kin, the families of deportees were left in agony. “Seeing that their loved ones were not going to emerge from the buses as expected, a woman collapsed, while others began to wail. ‘Why are they deporting him?’ a woman screamed in tears, as police officers rushed her away from the crowd.”
Per The Guardian: “Israel also forbade people from celebrating the release on Monday, firing teargas at family members and journalists waiting near Ofer prison in the occupied West Bank, where detainees were kept. A flyer distributed by the Israeli military warned people that ‘we are surveilling you everywhere’ and threatening that if they supported ‘terrorist organisations’ they could be arrested.”
Following the prisoner release, Trump went to cohost a hastily organized peace summit with Egyptian president Abdel Fattah al-Sisi and multiple world leaders, including Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, UN Secretary General António Guterres, French President Emmanuel Macron, Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, Spanish prime minister Pedro Sánchez, and British Prime Minister Keir Starmer. Trump and the leaders of Egypt, Qatar and Turkey held an official signing ceremony for the deal. Israel and Hamas, whom they expect to follow the plan, were not there.