Ben Mucelis (Ben Mycelis)

I don't think you could watch that footage of the Israeli hostages coming home, hugging their loved ones,

after being in captivity for so long and not feel something and not see those, you know, when you see those videos of the Palestinians and they're also celebrating that they're, you know, no longer at the whims of this brutal assault from the Israeli government.

when you look at them and see them dancing in the streets and things like that you have to be happy you have to say oh what what an excellent thing you know this is exactly what we want to see now the what i want to be sure about is how now are we going to ensure that this is a lasting and durable piece in the region

Because I want to remind everybody, like Ben did, that we've been through these ceasefires before.

November 2023, there was a ceasefire under the Biden administration where 50 Israeli hostages were released, 150 Palestinians were released.

That ended up lasting seven days.

In January 2025, just before Donald Trump took office, if you remember, there was another ceasefire.

And this was part of a multi-phase agreement by the Biden administration.

I'm sure that sounds familiar because we are now in another multi-phase agreement by this administration.

And phase one in that agreement included a six-week full and complete ceasefire, a withdrawal from populated areas, a release of hostages, which at that time included women, the elderly, people who were injured, and also was met with a huge surge of aid to the region.

And we never made it into phase two of that plan either.

And so I just want to urge caution here because phase one is kind of the easy part.

It's a big part.

And I don't want to downplay it at all because these families have been away for their loved ones for so long and people have been getting killed for so long.

So I don't want to downplay the importance of phase one.

It's incredibly important that these hostages are now home.

However,

I want to be sure that we're not going to get into this again.

And there are some things already that are concerning me, seeing already Hamas fill in this power vacuum that's been left in some of these areas.

I've already seen horrific videos, which I wish I could unsee, quite frankly, of Hamas executing Palestinians in the streets right now because they were saying they were collaborators with Israel.