Fifty Israeli hostages remain in Gaza. Twenty are presumed dead, and President Trump suggested on Sunday that more have passed away. From videos that Hamas has released, it is clear that some of the living hostages are barely alive. They look no different than the Jewish survivors of Nazi concentration camps — although of course they remain in captivity and their survival is very much in doubt.

Hundreds of thousands of Israelis, perhaps even a million, in what they called “a day of stoppage,” demonstrated for the release of the hostages. Protesters throughout the country blocked roads and highways and lit bonfires, while many businesses closed.

Hamas has now offered Israel the same 60-day ceasefire deal it had earlier rejected when Israel and the U.S. had proposed it two months ago. The proposed agreement consists of the release of 10 living hostages and the bodies of 18 that are deceased. In exchange, Israel would release 150 Palestinian prisoners. At the same time, Israel and Hamas would immediately begin to negotiate, through third parties, a permanent ceasefire.

Having obtained the deal it had sought just months ago, Israel has nevertheless rejected the Hamas offer. More specifically, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his extremist right-wing ministers have rejected the Hamas proposal. Netanyahu’s own senior military leadership wants the government to accept the deal, arguing that Israel has achieved its military objectives and Hamas no longer poses a serious security threat to the country.

Netanyahu claims that he wants all the hostages released as a condition of a ceasefire and prior to any negotiation. Yet he knows full well that Hamas will not do so, since it would lose all leverage by releasing the hostages. Netanyahu asserts that if Hamas fails to capitulate to his demands, the Israeli military will proceed with the attack on Gaza City that will displace hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, many of whom have already been shunted all over the Gaza Strip.

In addition, as Israel continues to targets in Gaza, it will inevitably destroy facilities like the Nasser Hospital, which it struck this week, and kill more innocent bystanders. And then Netanyahu will issue more statements regretting yet another “tragic mishap” with promises of “a thorough military investigation.”

Netanyahu remains impervious to international pressure, and pays no attention to the increasing surge in domestic Israeli opposition to the war. He continues to insist that his priority is to destroy Hamas, rather than to free the dwindling number of hostages that are still alive. While Steve Witkoff, Washington’s special envoy, has promised that the war will be over before the year’s end, that does not necessarily mean that there will be any hostages alive by that time. And that should be Israel’s priority.

Israel’s critics continue to press for the U.S. to withhold transferring any offensive weapons to Israel until Netanyahu capitulates and terminates the Gaza offensive. Others, like Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), would go even further by terminating all military assistance to Israel. Neither approach is likely to affect Netanyahu in the near-term. In any event, the proponents of either policy are unlikely to garner sufficient congressional support, much less White House backing, any time soon.

On the other hand, Washington should consider pressing Hamas, as a condition of forcing Israel to accept the ceasefire, that it release all the dead hostages, not only 18 of them, for burial in Israel. The dead may be offering some leverage to the terrorists, but not very much, and certainly not enough to move Netanyahu. In addition, Hamas should allow the Red Cross to visit the living hostages on a regular basis so that they are treated not as concentration camp inmates but as prisoners of war.

Should Hamas accept what is simply humanitarian behavior, Washington should pressure Israel by every means at its disposal to accept the ceasefire proposal immediately and begin negotiations with its arch-enemy so that the remaining hostages can go free.

If Hamas rejects such a plan, Washington should continue its unflinching political and military support for Jerusalem. In addition, Germany should resume arms shipments to Israel, and those countries planning to recognize a Palestinian state should hold off doing so until Hamas agrees to the revised proposal.

By now it is clear that Netanyahu and Hamas are equally cynical and equally prepared to go on fighting, whatever additional human tragedies this war will continue to create. Nevertheless, a proposal that supplements what Israel originally offered and Hamas now accepts, that would bring comfort to the families of all the dead, while reviving the prospects of the hostages that still live, would be difficult to for either side to refuse.

It would force Hamas to contemplate ongoing American support for Israel’s continued effort to vanquish it, should it reject the proposal. And it would force Netanyahu to face the prospect of losing U.S. assistance for his needless war if he is the one to reject it.

For these reasons, it is a proposal the White House and Witkoff would do well to consider and act upon.

Dov S. Zakheim is a senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and vice chairman of the board for the Foreign Policy Research Institute. He was undersecretary of Defense (comptroller) and chief financial officer for the Department of Defense from 2001 to 2004 and a deputy undersecretary of Defense from 1985 to 1987.

In 2017, there was a movement called “Me Too.” It was about taking women seriously when we complained about being sexually harassed or abused by men.

Eight years later, that has all gone out the window. Women are in fact being forced to share intimate spaces like changing rooms and locker rooms with men who claim to be women. 

Sandie Peggie is a nurse at the Victoria Hospital in Kirkaldy in Scotland, which is overseen by the National Health Service at Fife, a public body funded by taxpayers. One day, she found herself dealing with an unexpected period, bleeding through her uniform. This is an experience many women have had; it’s not unusual. She went into the women’s changing room to address it discretely. She did not expect to find a man in the room. 

The man in question is a doctor named Beth (born Theodore) Upton. He calls himself a transgender woman. Peggie asked the man to leave. He complained to superiors that Peggie was discriminating against him.

The National Health Service at Fife suspended Peggie for harassment. And so, eight years after MeToo, women are now being suspended from work for complaining about the presence of men in women’s intimate spaces. 

Peggie decided to take the matter to court. She sued the NHS Fife in an employment tribunal. That matter began in February. The proceedings are still ongoing. Peggie has been cleared of misconduct, yet these proceedings continue to drag on, wasting taxpayer money. Peggie last took the stand for one month ago today. We await a verdict in the coming months. 

An employment tribunal in Scotland has taken up weeks of time, over the course of several months and at the expense of the Scottish taxpayers, to decide whether or not women are permitted to have female-only spaces.

I have personally been in contact with lawyers and others in the U.K. who tell me that this is just going to have to play itself out because, in the words of one U.K. resident, the NHS “is now effectively rogue.”

This situation is not, of course, limited to Scotland, nor even to the U.K. American readers know that young women on the women’s swimming team at the University of Pennsylvania were forced to be naked in the presence of a man in their locker room 18 times per week throughout their 2021-2022 season. These young women, in their early twenties, were told by school administrators to stay silent. They were told that if they had any problems with the situation, that they needed to get mental health counseling.

Eight years after “Me Too,” women are being abused and gaslighted into believing that if we have a problem with men in our intimate spaces, we are actually the problem. We are being told that we must simply deal with men’s indecent exposure and voyeurism if they call themselves women.

We are told that this is just part of a left-right “culture war” against a “small community of marginalized people,” and that all opposition to transgender ideology comes from the MAGA right. 

None of this is true. And there are rank-and-file Democrats (women and men) across the country who are not okay with this, including myself. In 2023, I published a book on the topic, and in August 2024, I asked then-Vice President Kamala Harris to say out loud at the Democratic National Convention that a woman is an adult human female person. Needless to say, she did not.

The unvarnished truth is that the transgender issue is not about civil rights, but rather about abusing women. Its primary target is women and girls, but it actually abuses all of us by lying about the material reality of sex.

And now, a nurse in Scotland is being forced to sue her government employer just for the right not to be forced to share a changing room with a man — to deal with her bleeding without having to do it in front of a man. Scottish taxpayers are being made to pay for courts to preside over such an absurd case because their National Health Service refuses to accept the truth.

One day, a reckoning will come.

Kara Dansky is author of The TERF Report, “The Abolition of Sex: How the ‘Transgender’ Agenda Harms Women and Girls,” and “The Reckoning: How the Democrats and the Left Betrayed Women and Girls.”

Three universities touted restoration of federal funding as the crux for striking deals with the Trump administration, but it’s unclear to faculty and onlookers whether all the benefits have panned out for these institutions.   

While leadership at the University of Pennsylvania, Brown and Columbia, along with the Trump administration, have said funding was restored, some researchers still see their money cut and others have received no communication from administrators when asked about the details of restored funds.  

The fallout is a warning sign to other campuses looking to make deals with the administration, such as Harvard and the University of California.   

Michael Thaddeus, professor of mathematics at Columbia and vice president of the Columbia chapter of the American Association of University Professors, said his institution has become more secretive in recent years and university leadership has not given details to the restoration of money at the school.  

“My main thought is that it’s very hard to find out what’s going on, even for insiders, even for Columbia faculty, it’s very opaque,” he said.  

Federal money for academic research is a complicated process, making it difficult to fully understand how the money has been processed.  

“The funding agency, such as the National Institutes of Health, awards the grant. Then the General Services Administration disperses the money to the central administration of a university like Columbia. The central administration tells lab administrators or departmental administrators that the money is there, and then the principal investigators charge submit reimbursement requests to them. So, it’s really never clear with each with any given grant whether that pipeline was ever blocked or how it’s been unblocked,” Thaddeus said, adding the university covered some funding for certain projects during the federal pause. 

Some research projects are scrambling to hire back individuals that were fired during the funding pause while other projects related to topics such as transgender health have still not seen funding restored, according to The New York Times.  

The settlements the three universities entered with the Trump administration were similar in some stipulations such as changing policies around disciplinary and protest rules.  

In terms of amounts, the University of Pennsylvania did not have to pay a monetary sum to restore $175 million in funding, Columbia gave the Trump administration $225 million to restore $400 million in funding and Brown is paying $50 million to workplace development programs to get $500 million back.  

In a statement from Brown, the university noted it did not receive payments from the National Institutes of Health from April to July, which made up 70 percent of its research funding.  

“As of the end of July, the unreimbursed funds totaled more than $50 million, and this amount had been increasing by approximately $3.5 million per week. This was in addition to the outright termination of eight federal contracts and more than 30 federal grants,” Brown said. 

However, not all grants were restored to the university. 

“Of the eight federal contracts and more than 30 federal grants that had been terminated before the July 30 agreement, a portion of these were from federal agencies not under the purview of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and were therefore not reinstated per the terms of the agreement,” a spokesperson said. 

Jon Fansmith, senior vice president for government relations and national engagement at the American Council of Education, said schools who took the deals did get the advantage of having a clear path before the beginning of the new academic year in terms of what resources would be available for classrooms and staffing.  

“Having that hanging over your head, having the lack of federal funding that, again, was legally obligated to schools, having that restored, it really does make a huge difference for those campuses. And then there’s certainly all of the other kind of harder to quantify benefits of you’re not in the news cycle so much anymore, you’re not dealing with a hostile federal government, you’re not having to spend huge amounts of staff, time and money and legal fees and everything else to work through these situations,” he added. 

A Columbia spokesperson pointed to a public FAQ sheet that said the “potential impact on Columbia was billions of dollars in current and future grants, and a fast-approaching loss of talent, and our research excellence” due to the funding pause.

The University of Pennsylvania did not immediately respond to The Hill’s request for comment.  

The universities were hit hard by critics for the deals they made to get the funding back but have largely stayed mum on the situation.  

According to Rick Hess, senior fellow and the director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), one of the reasons schools are staying quiet is “it’s hard to brag about” making a deal with a political party universities have labeled as “full of bad people.”  

Hess also notes schools may be nervous the administration could swing back around as the deals did not include any guarantees the president would not go after the universities again in the future.  

Every university is watching the fallout of these deals, including the University of California and Harvard, which are currently working on deals with the administration.  

“I think they’re ready to move on from this, but they’re unable to because of the ripple effect that this is creating,” said Lynn Pasquerella, president of the American Association of Colleges and Universities. “So these deals came with significant policy concessions that compromise academic freedom, institutional autonomy and shared governance.” 

“The aggressive use of funding as a leverage coupled with demands for settlements, and these demands for settlements are reshaping the relationship between universities and the federal government, and the concern is that these settlements will serve as coercive templates that could pressure dozens of other colleges and universities into accepting restrictive conditions for federal funding, and it really is a new model that threatens the core principles of academic freedom, institutional autonomy and due process,” she added.