"Prior negotiations ran aground after Hamas insisted that it be able to include dead hostages, as opposed to just living ones, in the number required by the agreement’s first phase."

"In his speech, Biden indicated that Israel had now acceded to this previously rejected stipulation. 'Some remains of hostages who have been killed will be returned to their...families,' he said, 'bringing some degree of closure to their terrible grief.'..."

Writes Yair Rosenberg, in "Biden’s Bold Gaza Cease-Fire Gambit/The president has pushed events as far as he can, but even American presidents have their limits" (The Atlantic).

"The ability to spot danger in advance and prepare for it is the test of a body’s functioning."

"The Jewish nation has never excelled at foreseeing danger. We were surprised again and again—and the last time was the most awful one. That won’t happen under my leadership. This is what the state of Israel expects from me, and this is what I’ll do."

Netanyahu once said, quoted by Yair Rosenberg in "The End of Netanyahu/He sold Israelis a story about their safety. It turned out not to be true" (The Atlantic).

Israelis do not forgive failures to secure their safety. Golda Meir left politics after the debacle of the 1973 Yom Kippur War, in which Israel lost nearly 3,000 soldiers following a surprise Egyptian and Syrian attack. Her name is reviled by some in the country to this day. But what happened on October 7, 2023, was worse than what happened on October 6, 1973. Meir lost soldiers—people who had purposely put their lives on the line. Netanyahu lost civilians—the people the state and its soldiers were supposed to protect....  In the end, the man known as “Mr. Security” failed by his own standard, and he failed to fulfill the fundamental expectation of his fellow citizens.....

"In 1922, The New York Times published its first article about Adolf Hitler. The reporter, Cyril Brown, was aware of his subject’s anti-Jewish animus..."

"... but he wasn’t buying it. 'Several reliable, well-informed sources confirmed the idea that Hitler's anti-Semitism was not so genuine or violent as it sounded,' Brown wrote, 'and that he was merely using anti-Semitic propaganda as a bait to catch masses of followers.' Two years later, the Times published another news item on the future architect of the Holocaust: 'Hitler Tamed by Prison.' The Austrian activist, the piece said, 'looked a much sadder and wiser man,' and 'his behavior during his imprisonment convinced the authorities that [he] was no longer to be feared.' Many got Hamas wrong. But they shouldn’t have. Again and again, people say they intend to murder Jews. And yet, century after century, the world produces new, tortuous justifications for why anti-Jewish bigots don’t really mean what they say—even though they do."

Writes Yair Rosenberg, in "What Hamas Wants/The straightforward explanation that the experts missed" (The Atlantic).

"The very term anti-Semitism, which casts Jews in racial terms, was popularized by a German anti-Jewish activist who wanted to give his hatred a scientific sheen."

"Race is a social construct, and this is how it was constructed in Nazi Germany and much of Europe.... [W]ell-meaning people... don’t know how to define Jews [because]... Judaism predates Western categories. It’s not quite a religion, because one can be Jewish regardless of observance or specific belief. (Einstein, for example, was proudly Jewish but not religiously observant.) But it’s also not quite a race, because people can convert in! It’s not merely a culture or an ethnicity, because that leaves out all the religious components. And it’s not simply a nationality, because although Jews do have a homeland and many identify as part of a nation, others do not."

Writes Yair Rosenberg in "Are Jews a Race?/Whoopi Goldberg’s Holocaust comments reflect how Jews don’t fit into Western boxes" (The Atlantic).

Another reason why it's "not quite a race" is that race was never good science. From "The Disturbing Resilience of Scientific Racism" (Smithsonian):