10/29/25: Israel Shatters Ceasefire In Gaza, RSF Massacre in Sudan, Hurricane Slams Jamaica

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0:37Good morning, everybody. Happy Wednesday. Have an amazing show for everybody today. Bro show. People live for the pound. It's good to see you. Two bro shows in a row on Wednesday. Two bro shows in a row. That's right. All thanks to my crazy schedule, but thank you for having me, Ryan. I appreciate it here on Wednesday. Always a pleasure. Well, mostly thank you to Emily for letting me swap around with her. Oh, my God. All right, here's the tough part of the job. What do we have today? Israel. Okay, we're going to start with Israel breaking the ceasefire, bombing parts of Gaza, where you talk about their pretext.

1:09We'll analyze some of what that is. Then Ryan is going to give us an update on some horrific developments in South Sudan. Sorry, no, in Sudan. I'm not exactly familiar. The RSF, there's a UAE-backed militia and lots of killing. It's just a horrific, horrific story. We're going to talk about the storm. Hurricane Melissa made landfall yesterday in Jamaica, as well as the fact that there are thousands, thousands of American service members currently in Caribbean waters, remember, as part of this Venezuelan regime change operation. And there's some big question marks, actually, as to their own role.

1:43Are they going to continue with drug interdiction? Are they going to help with hurricane relief? They themselves potentially could be at risk, according to some sources that I spoke to. We're going to get over to OpenAI. There is a new story from ChatGPT that nearly a million people are actually interacting with ChatGPT on the issue of mental illness and suicide, in addition to a major whistleblower inside of ChatGPT warning not to believe Sam Altman's claims about AI pornography, which I believe we covered in our last question. We did indeed, and it's a very disappointment because I really, like my last guess was to just trust Sam Altman.

2:20And if we can't trust Sam Altman, who can we trust? If we can't trust Altman, who indeed can we all trust? By the way, you'll all be happy to know that the state of California has helped Sam Altman and OpenAI transform into a for-profit company. So now we can just get rid of that pesky little nonprofit status. How lovely for him. Yes. Thank you to the state of California, to Gavin Newsom and all the officials there who assisted the multi-billionaire. We are going to talk about Sami Hamdi. Ryan, you're going to give us a breakdown on this. He's a British political commentator. He's critical of Israel, and he was detained at a California airport.

2:53Current political prisoner in the United States. Has he been deported? No. Or is he? Okay. Wow. Okay. He's still in prison for his politics. Some of the details there on Sami Hamdi. Rings a little hollow, isn't it, whenever we critique the UK for doing the exemption thing? Yeah. Yeah. A little tough. A little tough. Let him speak freely over here, but if they come here, they're going to prison. That's right. Exactly. All right. Let's go to talk. We're also going to talk about Snap, actually, by the way. We touched a little bit on it yesterday, but there's some brinksmanship going on within the current United States government about whether some 42 million Americans who are dependent on the SNAP food stamp program are going to receive some of their payments and benefits on Friday, I believe.

3:33There's some fiscal cliff issues, but there are claims that the administration actually could pay them if they wanted to. There's actually some Republican efforts to try and to immediately fund the SNAP program, but that is getting poured cold water on by the White House and by Senate leadership. So this is when the shutdown really actually might start to impact millions of people's lives outside of the DMV here. Not to say that it already hasn't, but in particular, really a tangible thing in addition to air traffic control problems that we've seen across the country. And then finally, we're going to talk with Ben Smith about China.

4:07And he wrote a very interesting piece. Actually, I really liked it. And it says, Trump is poised to end Washington's decade of the China Hawks. Very astute, actually, in terms of where things are going. You probably have tracked my own evolution on the issue if you've been watching over the last seven or eight years. And it is, of course, something that any future politician is going to have to grapple with. Before we get to that, thank you to everybody who's been subscribing, breakingpoints.com, if you can support the show. If not, no worries. Please hit subscribe on the YouTube video. If you're listening to this on a podcast, send an episode to a friend or rate us five stars.

4:39It really helps us with growth. Let's go ahead and put this then up on the screen. Israel has resumed the Gaza ceasefire now after some 104 Palestinians were killed in airstrikes. Prime Minister Netanyahu ordered, quote, powerful strikes in Gaza as the ceasefire breaks down. I'm going to kick it to Ryan because, Ryan, I don't really know. So there were two separate instances of their claims for the ceasefire breakdown. So why don't you explain it to us? Right. If you're going to break a ceasefire, better to have two pretexts rather than just one pretext. The irony being, of course, that Israel has been out of compliance with the ceasefire from the beginning because a key part of the agreement was that it would flood in humanitarian aid.

5:24They immediately reneged on that agreement. Humanitarian aid is not flooding in. if we lived in a world where we just follow these things in a neutral and dispassionate way, we'd say, well, that is a violation of the ceasefire. I suppose now Hamas is going to just carpet bomb Tel Aviv as a response to Israel breaking the ceasefire. But let's get into the two pretexts. The first is the claims of an almost identical situation in Rafa, where a, what they're saying is that there was basically a cell, and this is within the realm of possibility, that a cell of fighters, whether it's Islamic Jihad or Hamas, gets cut off, you know, from the rest of the forces, and they don't have access to the knowledge that this war has ended.

6:14Like, people on all sides have acknowledged that this is a possibility, and that if you come on these fighters, there may be conflict, and that is not ipso facto a breaking of the ceasefire that should launch a full-scale war. So according to the Israeli side, that is what happened. We don't have any information from the Hamas side or the Islamic Jihad side, which would, if it was a fighter or a group of fighters who were trapped, like, we wouldn't actually be able to get any information from Hamas or PIJ. Like, they just, they wouldn't, they wouldn't know about that. This is a group that would have lost touch with many, many months ago.

6:52The last time they claimed this, according to my sources, it was, in fact, them just running over an unexploded ordinance or an IED and then claiming that they had gotten into a confrontation. And they never backed up their claim of having confronted Palestinian fighters with any body cam footage, any actual anybody captured, any evidence, any drone footage, any evidence whatsoever. Ballistic, forensic, anything that would have shown that their story matched up. So I think that at this point we can say that the explosive, the story of them running over the explosive is we're going to lean in that direction.

7:30So one Israeli soldier has been said by the Israeli government to have been killed. So that happens. You're not going to they're not going to name a person, a soldier who died, who didn't die. So somehow somebody, some Israeli soldier did die. We also have and we can roll a two here while I'm explaining this. So this is, according to, this is drone footage put out by the Israeli military, which, and you can go and find the longer video, which claims to have found evidence that Hamas is playing games with the remains of captives. This is actually an Israeli soldier who was killed in 2024, and Israel at the time was able to recover most of his remains, but there was some portion remained with Hamas.

8:26And basically what they're saying happened in this footage is that they kind of moved it to a particular area and then called in the Red Cross and called in a photographer and said, look, like we found this body here. And then they turned it over to the Red Cross. And what Israel is saying is that this is evidence that they're playing games and they're stalling for time and that, in fact, they do know where more of the remains are than they're letting on. This still remains to develop. We don't know exactly yet what happened here, but you can watch the video and see for yourself that the Israeli claim, on its face, seems to have some merit to it.

9:10And this is what they have released, as you said. So, yeah, I mean, this is one of those. Right. And we also have to be extremely careful because any government should be should be should have its claims treated with extreme skepticism. But Hamas is a government, too. Yes. So it's like, listen, we have no idea. There is I mean, this is part of the difficulty in the post-war collapse of Gaza is that, you know, is there any centralized Hamas in terms of dealing with it? And the more Hamas tries to become centralized, the more they criticize. Exactly. The more they get criticized, the more they get bombed now.

9:45And should 102 people have been killed? 104, I think it is this morning. 104 Palestinians killed as of this morning in retaliation. We don't exactly even know what the retaliatory strike was, who the people were that were involved. And let's think about this. In either of these scenarios, okay, let's say that you did catch them playing games with these remains and stalling for time. Does that justify a bombing campaign across Gaza that kills more than 100 people and wounds more than 200? And if they did encounter a fighter who had been stuck for eight months in a tunnel and he popped up and there was a firefight, does that justify killing 100?

10:28Well, let me just read from Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene. Israel's military says Wednesday that the ceasefire was back on in Gaza after it killed 104 people. including 46 children. 46 children, exclamation, are these not war crimes? Those are by definition war crimes. A question you can ask. Yeah, it almost seems quaint, frankly, after what we all lived through. We will also note from the administration, they're still trying desperately to hold this thing together. Let's put this up here on the screen. This is A3, Vice President J.D. Vance telling reporters that the Gaza ceasefire will hold, despite today's exchange of fire.

11:02Quote, the ceasefire is holding. That doesn't mean that there aren't going to be little skirmishes here and there. We know that Hamas or somebody else within Gaza attacked an IDF soldier. He said, notably avoiding a definitive assignment of blame on Hamas. We expect the Israelis are going to respond, but I think the president's peace is going to hold despite it. That seems interesting, Ryan. Can we compare with the statement of Secretary of State Marco Rubio? And this to set context for Rubio here, this was on Air Force One before these incidents. And I feel like Rubio, the way he poked in here and put his face in front of Trump, sort of greenlit what came next.

11:44As we talked about last week, there's now this deconfliction zone, which where the U.S. says that any response to a ceasefire break has to come through the United States. The United States is going to make sure that the peace is maintained through this like 200 service member unit and this deconfliction zone. And Netanyahu said publicly, we appreciate the Americans, but of course, we'll never allow that. We are our own sovereign people. And so there's been a tug and tug of war over who gets to break this ceasefire. Can Israel just unilaterally break it? And then you have Rubio coming out and basically saying, yeah, Israel can do whatever it wants.

12:22So listen to Marco Rubio on Air Force One here. You're talking about the strike against Hamas and a jihad individual? Yeah, look, Israel didn't surrender its right to self-defense. Obviously, the ceasefire is based on obligations on both sides. By the way, we'd also like to see Hamas speed up the return of hostage bodies. We still have 13 hostages, two Americans included. But we don't view that as a violation of the ceasefire. They have a right, there's an imminent threat to Israel. And all the mediators agree with that. So leaning a little closer to Israel there. But at the same time, as you heard him say, we don't consider the slow release of the remains to be a violation of the ceasefire.

13:01And that's been a huge issue in Israel. Because they really believe that they have all of the bodies and they're worrying about it. And actually one of the things that Hamas has responded with, they say, quote, we confirm that any Zionist escalation will hinder the search, excavation, recovery of the bodies, which will lead to a delay in the occupation's recovery of the bodies of its dead. Later, Hamas issued a statement calling on mediators to take immediate action to pressure Israel to restrain its escalation against civilians in Gaza and to compel it fully abide by the ceasefire agreement. What's crazy is this morning is Israel now is saying that they are back in full compliance of the ceasefire.

13:34So it's one of those where, I mean, I don't really know what ceasefire means if you just get to bomb and attack each other based on whatever you want. An IDF reservist, by the way, was apparently killed in that Tuesday attack. I did find it interesting in Rubio's comment. He said Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad. Maybe you can explain to this. They are not party to the ceasefire, correct? No, they are. Well, but this is what I'm trying to get at is like politically, yes, but this is what I'm saying in terms of the actual control inside of Gaza. Yes. As in who? No. I mean there's roving. There's no central law and order.

14:10There's people with guns in an area which has been bombed to nothing. it'd be like saying that you know in the middle of a mad max collapse that certain looters or something speak on behalf of the entire population it just doesn't really work that way right and just the way that the kind of uh defense of gaza worked over the last two years you'd have all these different units who were pretty stationary like they would move around but like if you're the bete hanun battalion you you stay in bete hanun like you're not you're kind of shifting around the strip. And so for operational security, obviously there is not a lot of like electronic communication going on between a lot of these units because, you know, Israel has that entire thing, you know, tapped and wired and they're going to, and they're going to map out these, the different flows of communications and just then start carpet bombing any areas they see being lit up.

15:05And so that was always a question going into the ceasefire. Exactly what you're saying like okay we've got the negotiators in you know in doha agreeing to this on behalf of pij on behalf of hamas but do they speak for every you know guerrilla unit in right in uh gaza and the hope was basically from from the meat eaters and from everybody involved was that that they that just the pressure of the the momentum of the ceasefire would then kind of basically work to persuade. There's more persuasion. Like you're not ordering, like these guys are armed and they're in these, and they're out there. They can make their own decisions.

15:48So yes, that is a, that is a live question here, which when Israel then kills more than a hundred people, think about what that does to the psychology of these fighters who didn't like the idea of ceasefire to begin with because they're like, you know, we think for whatever reason, and now they're like, look, we told you. It's been three weeks, exactly three weeks. I'm saying, look, we told you Israel was never going to abide by this. Now they just killed another hundred people for nothing. Right. And so the health ministry, you know, caveats, etc. 46 children, 20 were women of the 104 Palestinians who were killed.

16:30Interesting. in terms of the Israeli response there. We do have some of the initial views of what that looks like. Let's go and put this image up here on the screen. This was immediately yesterday in the aftermath of what some of the attacks actually looked like. And all of this actually is in line with this new yellow line. We can put that up here on the screen for the Wall Street Journal. Ryan, again, maybe you can help explain it a little bit to the audience. This so-called yellow line was the demarcation line through which Israel would control the ceasefire. But from the Wall Street Journal, they're saying a trip to the Gaza yellow line shows that Israel is digging into its positions and seems to creating some sort of permanent berm for some sort of buffer zone.

17:15So can you just explain? Because I believe that the yellow line that was originally agreed to has now changed and they're actually occupying more of Gaza than they initially agreed upon. Right. So the deal was, OK. You will withdraw, Israel will withdraw back to this yellow line. And then as soon as they do that, we'll release, we being Hamas will release all of the captives. And so Israel withdrew back to this yellow line. Hamas released all the captives. And then people started going back to their homes. People came close to this yellow line, which is not marked anywhere at the time. Still is not, you know, not really marked.

17:53and so they'd go to say eastern gaza city where their where their homes are and they would be shot and killed like an entire bus a family you know in a bus the entire family killed inside this bus uh and so you had then this kind of contradictory impulse on both sides humanitarian organization would say well wait a minute this is not fair you're not marking like you're not even telling people what kind of sick game is this? Like people have just have to guess. And as well say, well, we published maps, they should be able to look at the map. But people can't even recognize their own neighborhoods, because it's just complete rubble.

18:31Like and think about as you think about as you're walking through your own neighborhood, like the different ways that you know how to get around. Like there's this, this giant tree, there's this yellow house at the corner. There's the gas station here. Now imagine you've been away for eight months. You come back, the tree is gone. The gas station is a pile of rubble. The yellow house is a pile of rubble. The red house that you knew was a pile of rubble. At that point, how do you even find your way? So saying that, hey, there's a map on Facebook that you can look at isn't very helpful to people.

19:03Then they said, okay, we're going to put out yellow markers like every 200 meters or something. Also not extraordinarily helpful. Now they're building much more significant reinforcements. And then you see the contradictory nature of it. You're like, oh, wait a minute. So now basically this is just going to become your territory because what's inside the kind of Hamas controlled area, if you want to call it that, is basically Western Gaza, but not Northern and Southern, and then not the Eastern part either. It's like the inner, just the inner slice of it. And all of the kind of agricultural area, lots of area that used to be heavily populated is all within this Israeli zone.

19:47And they ironically, I saw some, I think, propagandists calling it like free Gaza. It's like, no, no, no, the part that's occupied by Israel can't really call that free Gaza. But what they're setting up is just never leaving this area. That seems to be, and that's what the Wall Street Journal suggests here, that they're reinforcing this in a fundamental way. And the irony being that they were negotiating over whether the buffer zone at the edge of Gaza would be 800 meters or 1 ,200 meters. And now Israel seems to be trying to create a reality where they're just way inside there. And so broadly here with the ceasefire, Ryan, what do you expect in terms of how this all plays out?

20:36Because it, flagged by our producer Mac, let's put this up here on the screen, Netanyahu's testimony, if you're all wondering, in his criminal trial was cut short today, yesterday over, quote, security developments that happened in Gaza. Amazing coincidence. It just keeps happening, doesn't it? So it's one of those where is it every single time that he's going to have to testify that there just happens to be some sort of pretext in Gaza, like at the subject of the Israeli political sphere of what's happening? And then apparently America is just fine with them violating the ceasefire and encroaching here on the yellow line.

21:12It just looks very grim. And all the cynics initially talking about the ceasefire seem pretty vindicated, I think, today. Yeah, I wish we would just give the guy asylum. like political asylum get a place in south florida like it is it is not fair for a hundred plus palestinians to have to die so that he can delay a criminal trial that's that's no reason for anybody to lose a life right like just just end this like it's yeah but yes this has been this is whenever he's gotten into political trouble or criminal trouble over the last two years, you've seen strategy change and tactics change around the attack on Gaza.

21:57And we're still seeing that. We do a brief update on what's going on. Yes. You're going to have to fully brief all of us. I know this happened overnight here, but I do think it's an important story. Sudan, mass killings. Yeah. In the town of Al-Fashir was where the Syrian army capital has been in North Darfur, and there's been this civil war going on since 2023. And the UAE has come in heavily, United Arab Emirates has come in heavily on the side of what's called the RSF, the Rapid Support Forces. And a year ago, the U.S. State Department said the RSF is committing ethnic cleansing in Darfur and in Sudan.

22:46And the support of the UAE has continued to pay. So you can put up A8 here. And so Al-Fajr finally yesterday, and over the last couple of days, but it's kind of now fully fallen to the RSF. And what you're looking at here are a ton of people rounded up by the RSF who, as we understand it, and there is much more disturbing video that would confirm this that we're not going to show you here, were then executed. And this is not the first time that the RSF has taken over a city and estimates of civilian massacres as a result have been over 10 ,000, like in a particular city. Like this absolute horrific bloodbath.

23:43If we put up A9, a lot of the OSINT people online are saying they have never seen visible blood from space. But what precipitated this? Well, so what precipitated this precisely is Al Fasher has been basically surrounded by the RSF for a year and a half. And it's one of the remaining key strongholds of the SAF, their opposition. And so what precipitated the massacre was that they finally managed to break through and take it. What precipitated it more broadly is gold, basically. Sudan has significant wealth underneath its ground. And why is the UAE supporting this militia? So the UAE has this massive Africa play that it's been doing.

24:44The UAE is supporting African proxy forces all over the continent, like absolutely everywhere. And the UAE, like Qatar, is technically a country, but it's more like an investment vehicle slash mafia that is trying to figure out how to take this wealth that has come out of the ground, this fossil fuel wealth that it's created in the last several decades, and only several decades, like 50 years ago or so, this is a deeply poor area. Now it's like the richest place on earth. They know that that's not going to last forever. At some point, you tap the last bit of natural gas and oil. And so their question is, what next for us?

25:34And what's next for them is that they are building ports and creating alliances all over Africa for the continued extraction of natural resources and funding all of these civil conflicts to make it easier for them to then, to then get access oftentimes kind of arming, uh, arming both sides of, of the conflict. But in this case, they've really thrown their lot in with RSF and, um, we could put up a 11 real quick to show that how, how, how much this is escalating. So this is the foreign, uh, foreign relations chairman saying, um, quote, the horrors, the Republican, the horrors and Darfur's Al-Fasher no accident.

26:20They were the RSF's plan all along. I think that's true. The RSF has waged terror and committed unspeakable atrocities, genocide among them against the Sudanese people. The RSF must be called what it is, a foreign terrorist organization and officially designated as one. America is not safer, secure, or more prosperous with the RSF slaughtering thousands. And so, you know, to hear to hear Jim Risch talk like that, then makes you ask the question, wait a minute, hold on a second. So you're saying that our ally, the UAE, is a major terrorist financer? Because that's what you have to say, if you agree with that statement, which is true.