Finally, a deal: the fragile peace in Gaza

0:10Hello and welcome to The Intelligence from The Economist. I'm Rosie Blore. And I'm Jason Palmer. Every weekday, we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world.

0:24Today, we launch The Economist Insider, our new video offering for subscribers. It'll be a bit like you're sitting in on the meetings where we kick around the biggest ideas and tackle the thorniest questions. But now twice a week, it's a show led by our senior editors and writers. And you can't see it from where you're listening, but believe me, the ravages of age have come for my face. Despite my misgivings, today I'll be trying one of those newfangled red light masks to see if they really could make me less ravaged.

1:02But first...

1:13Singing, dancing and celebration across Gaza today after a peace plan was agreed between the Israeli government and Hamas. Jubilation in Israel too, as hostage families sung The People of Israel Live.

1:32The final paces of the deal came complete with truly Trumpian theatrics. Marco Rubio interrupted a live press conference. I was just given a note by the Secretary of State saying that we're very close to a deal in the Middle East and they're going to need me pretty quickly. Both sides are ready to approve. The plan is just the start of a long and tricky process. But for now, a breakthrough and a time to celebrate. It has been two years and two days since the massacre of October 7th, 2023. Greg Karlstrom is our Middle East correspondent. Gaza has been left in ruins. Israel has lost allies and friends around the world.

2:19Finally, all of that seems to be coming to an end. And this is the first time in two years that we have what looks like it could be a durable agreement to end the war in Gaza. Greg, we've been here so many times discussing horror and war. This is a really momentous day. Tell me what this agreement means for the next few days. The deal was meant to be signed on Thursday, about two hours from when we recorded this conversation, assuming it all goes well. After that, the fighting is meant to stop. From there, Hamas will have 72 hours, according to the text of the deal, to return the 48 hostages who are being held in Gaza.

3:03Now, it may need a bit longer than that to release the 20 of those hostages who are living. Donald Trump thinks it may not happen until Monday. And there's some question about whether it can return the bodies of the 28 hostages who died in captivity. It's not sure where all of them are buried or located at this point. But within a few days, at least all of the living hostages should go home to Israel. In parallel to that, Israel will release 1 ,950 Palestinian prisoners who it is holding in its jail, some of whom have been held without charge for long periods of time. And once that happens, once the hostage deal is done, the Israeli army will pull back somewhat from its current positions in Gaza.

3:45It will continue to occupy more than half of Gaza, but it will pull back from the big cities and it will allow a large influx of humanitarian aid to go into the strip. And how have the two sides reacted to this deal? The public messaging from both sides has been very positive. Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, called it a great day for Israel. He has, of course, resisted a ceasefire for many months because he's worried about what that means for his political situation, for the stability of his coalition. But we've seen him over the past few days pivot in his messaging and try to frame this Trump plan for a ceasefire as being a victory for Israel.

4:29And then Hamas, too, has been publicly quite supportive. They issued a statement overnight thanking Donald Trump for his efforts, thanking the Arab countries that were involved in mediating this. They have some reservations about the deal, about the prospect of Israeli withdrawal from Gaza, demands for them to disarm, things like that. But in general, they have been supportive of the agreement. Greg, Donald Trump said he was going to get this deal done and he appears to have done so. How much has he really influenced what's in it? I think he deserves a lot of credit for pushing this through. I think it's a demonstration that when an American president is serious about trying to end this war, he actually can end it.

5:14It makes you think of how many missed opportunities there have been, both under Joe Biden and earlier under Donald Trump, where this war could have ended and a deal probably quite similar to this could have been reached. But Trump finally decided to embrace a serious proposal for ending the war, something that is aligned with what America's partners in the Arab world want. And then he put a lot of pressure on Netanyahu to accept that deal. So that went a long way towards shifting the Israeli position. And then I think in parallel to that, Arab states and Turkey did the same with Hamas. They made it very clear to Hamas that this was the group's last chance to reach a ceasefire and that the consequences, if it did not, would be quite severe.

6:00Greg, let's turn from the jubilation and importance of this moment to what happens next. What might a new government in Gaza look like? It really depends on who you ask. If you look at the Trump plan, there is meant to be something called the Board of Peace, which would oversee post-war governance in Gaza. Trump would be the chair of that. Tony Blair, the former British prime minister, has been tapped to join it. and then there will be some other people nominated to join it in the coming days. And that body would work with Palestinians, unnamed Palestinians at this point, to govern Gaza. The Palestinian Authority in the occupied West Bank wants to play a role in post-war governance.

6:44Israel doesn't want it to. Israel would prefer to see some sort of other arrangement in Gaza. And Hamas is insisting on playing a role as well. And that's one of the places where I think in the future, once we get past these first few days of hostage release and partial Israeli withdrawal, that's one of the areas where this agreement could run into problems is Hamas insisting on playing a role in Gaza when the agreement says quite clearly that it should not, when Trump doesn't want it to, Israel doesn't want it to, Arab countries don't want it to. But Hamas, throughout the negotiations has stubbornly refused to completely cede its role.

7:22So what you're saying is the early phase of this deal looks quite promising, but there's still some way to go on what happens after that. What's quite striking about this is if you read the Trump plan, it doesn't say anything about phases. It's meant to be one cohesive package, and that was the way Trump presented it at the White House. But during the negotiations, both Israel and Hamas glommed onto this idea of breaking it up, starting with this first phase that was agreed overnight, and then leaving the more difficult questions about post-war governance, disarmament, all of those things, leaving that for the second phase.

7:59And the Americans went along with that. And that was, I think, why they were able to reach a deal, because they postponed discussion of those much more complicated issues. But at some point, they are going to have to try and tackle those issues. And they're all interrelated. And this is where it gets very problematic. Hamas wants Israel to withdraw from Gaza. Israel doesn't want to withdraw unless Hamas is disarmed. Hamas says it won't disarm unless it can hand over its weapons to a Palestinian state. Israel says it won't allow the creation of a Palestinian state. And so on and so forth. You have this circle of problems that you have to deal with and everything is interlocking.

8:37So maintaining this ceasefire is going to take a lot of sustained attention from Donald Trump. He's going to have to keep pressure on Israel to abide by the agreement. Arab states are going to have to pressure the Palestinians when it comes to post-war governance and disarmament and things like that. There's a lot of work ahead for the negotiators. And so once we get past the optimism of these first few days, I think a much more difficult reality might set in. Greg, very good to talk to you. Thank you so much. Thank you.

9:37is that our output is collective, that the ideas are more important than their author, that any given analysis is shaped by the whole organization, often after endless discussion in hallway chats and debate in our editorial meetings. Now we're offering a kind of window into those conversations, into how our top editors and correspondents wrestle with the biggest and trickiest questions that the whirlwind news agenda presents, And we want you to be part of those debates too. So today I'm joined by Zannie Minton-Bettos, our editor-in-chief, and Ed Carr, our deputy editor, to explain what it's all about.

10:15Hi, Zannie. Hi, Ed. Hello, hello. Very nice to join you. Hi, Jason. We've heard from both of you a bit on the show, Trails, if you like, during the week, but you're here to tell us a bit more. What are we launching today? We are launching The Insider, which is our new weekly video show that Ed and I are going to co-host every Thursday. It's a new foray into a new medium for us. The idea behind this is to give our subscribers a sense of what goes on inside the paper and let them join the conversation that we have about the really important events and topics of the day. We'll be answering questions that our subscribers send us.

10:51And it's also an opportunity for us to have conversations with some of the most interesting people in the world. People who agree with us, but also people who disagree with us. So launch day then. And who is on the first edition of this show? Well, Jason, the plan until this morning had been that our first show would be on tariffs, a subject close to The Economist's heart. And it's about six months since President Trump's Liberation Day. However, the momentous news from the Middle East overnight, the announcement of a ceasefire and imminent hostage release, caused us to, both for the weekly paper and indeed for this show, rip up our plans and start again.

11:27As many of you will know, we publish on Thursdays, which means that most of our pages go to the printers overnight on Wednesday, including our cover. But when huge news happens, we can rip up those plans, pay the printers some extra and start again. And so in the last few hours, my Middle East colleagues have been beavering away, putting together an excellent briefing, explaining how this deal came about, what happens next. Our foreign editor, Patrick Fowles, my deputy, Ed Carr, and I have been thrashing out what we should make of it in our new cover leader. And we decided this was the subject that we should discuss in The Insider today.

12:01An extraordinary moment, an extraordinary triumph for President Donald Trump. But what comes next? And that's what we're going to be talking about. We're going to have Anshel Pfeffer, our excellent Israel correspondent down the line from Jerusalem. We'll have Greg Karlstrom, our Middle East correspondent from Riyadh. Then the rest of us will be debating in the studio just how big a moment this is. It's a huge number of questions. We're going to be a little bit bleary eyed. Many of us have been up for really quite a long time already. But we thought this change was worth it because it is just such a momentous occasion.

12:34And we have the experts who can help you make sense of it. Although we won't be discussing tariffs, we will show the full interview that I did with Prime Minister Mark Carney a few days ago. It's a really interesting discussion. He has some very interesting ideas about where the global trading system could go, even with the US hidden behind high tariffs. And I promise that we will come back to the question of tariffs, asking whether we were wrong, whether they do less damage than we free traders might think, or whether, as I suspect, we're going to see the damage coming in due course. So there's sort of two elements then to the insider, the interview aspect, bringing in external voices that may or may not agree with us, but also sort of lifting the veil on how we come to editorial decisions.

13:17It sounds a lot like our internally famed editorial meetings. Well, that's right. The show will be like one of those meetings. And the characteristics of those editorial meetings, we hold them on Fridays and on Mondays, is that everybody from the paper can speak and offer an opinion. And we set out what are going to be our editorials for the week and we debate them. Sometimes everyone agrees at the beginning, but much more often there is real dispute and debate and sometimes quite intense debate. And we want to give a sense to people of the kinds of arguments that we bring forward and we hammer out consensus for the leader itself.

13:51You'll also get a sense of how Ed and I work together. We've been doing this now for a decade in these roles. And I used to write for Ed for many years before that. And we disagree, usually politely. where probably, I can see Ed is actually smiling as I'm saying this, itching to say we disagree more often than we do. Only the polite stuff will make it to air, I presume. I hope not. I hope occasionally we'll be able to have a go at each other. Now, it's not just you two talking, arguing, being polite, impolite. From all the activity in a new corner of the office, I know there's more than just your show.

14:25Tell me what else the insider offers. Quite right. We've been piloting this for a while now. There are four other new shows, each of which appears once a month, so one a week. One is our fantastic defence editor, Shashank Joshi, will be hosting Inside Defence. Hello and welcome to Inside Defence. Today we're asking, what does the future of war look like? His first guest next week will be Mark Rutter, the Secretary General of NATO. Then we have Inside Geopolitics with our wonderful Telegram columnist and geopolitics editor David Rennie. Today, we're asking, is Donald Trump making China great again?

15:05Hello, and welcome back to Inside Economics. I'm Rachna Shanbog, the economist, business affairs editor. Inside Economics, our economics editor, Henry Kerr, and Rachna Shanbog, business affairs editor, and Mike Bird, our New York-based finance correspondent, will be unpicking the biggest economic questions of the day. We're going to be talking about the economics of immigration. Starting off, we're going to talk about the anti-immigration wave. And last but absolutely not least, we're doing Inside Tech. Hello and welcome to Inside Tech from The Economist studio in London. Alex Hearn, our AI correspondent extraordinaire, is as ever here with me.

15:45How are you, Alex? I'm all good. Thank you very much for asking, Deputy Editor Tom Standage. I just slipped my title in there. Very nice. And the two of them are just brilliant. This is not our medium, Jason, as you know. Your medium is audio. Ed and I, our medium is really print. Ah, but video has come for us all. It has, it has. So we're learning as we go along. So Jason, do you have any advice for us as the voice of The Economist? I absolutely do not. I might have said, when the cameras come for you, do resist. But you know what? That didn't work out well for me, so. It's a new world. You've got to embrace it.

16:23and it'll be fun. The truth is that when the conversations start, we're all so naturally argumentative that that's all you focus on anyway.

16:31So Jason, our show appears each Thursday at six o 'clock London time. That's 1 p.m. New York time. And then the specialist shows are on Tuesday on defence, economics, tech and geopolitics. And of course, you can watch all of those shows on demand. Zannie, Ed, thanks very much for your time now. and I'll be seeing you on the other side of a screen later today. Thanks, Jason. Thank you, and I hope you join us one of these days. I'm waiting for my invitation.

17:09Sorry, I just was in the middle of something. Sarah Larniuk is an audio correspondent for The Economist and has come into the studio with, I mean, what looks like a hockey mask with a light show attached on her face. Sarah, what is going on? Jason, this is a red light mask. It's improving my skin's complexion and its elasticity. It's a way of the future. Yeah, there you go. See, 10 minutes. 10 minutes and I'm well on my way to being young forever. Okay, all right, hold on. Seriously, what is the proposition here? What is this thing supposed to do for you? So the proposition here is that the mask has red and near-infrared light-emitting diodes or LEDs in it.

17:53And this light goes on to stimulate the production of collagen and elastin in your skin. Now, those are the proteins that are really important for slowing aging, lessening the appearance of wrinkles, evening out skin tone, reversing some of the milder signs of sun damage to your skin. So in effect, this mask promises to make you look younger for longer. And the science was originally popularly pioneered by none other than NASA, so you know it's good. What, to make younger looking astronauts? Well, we need them to last forever because they're really smart, Jason. But also, the fact is that their research originally started with plants.

18:34It helped plants grow in space. And then their idea was that it would help heal astronauts' wounds. because apparently when you're in zero gravity, your wounds heal more slowly. Go figure. You'll forgive me if this sounds like marketing. What am I allowed to say on the show? Nonsense? If you don't want to believe me, you can turn to, you know, dermatological experts because I did speak to a number of them, one of them being the director of dermatological research at the New York Medical College. Her name is Shoshana Marmon, who confirmed the scientific studies do support that this works. Red and near-infrared light hits the skin.

19:12It penetrates a few millimeters into the epidermis and the dermis. Inside those layers, it's absorbed by mitochondria that helps the mitochondria produce more ATP. And ATP is the energy currency of the cell. So with that extra energy, fiber busts, which are the cells that build collagen and elastin, they can step up their activity. And enzymes that normally break down collagen are dialed down. Did you want to try it? Oh, no. Do you want me to try it? I kind of want you to try it, Jason. In order for it to work properly, you're meant to have a clean face. A little tea tree oil for you. Just like a little cleanse.

19:49Am I shiny? No, it's just that your face is meant to be clean. There you go. Pop that on. There you go. Velcro is all in the back of your head. There you go. How long do I have to do this? So 10 minutes, three times a week for about two months before you'll see your wrinkles kind of lessening in their depth. As a former man of science, despite my foolish appearance, you say it works, but quantitatively, how do we know this works? So one of the studies that I found most compelling, particularly in their methodology, was that they took people and deployed red and near-infrared light to their faces, but only half of them.

20:27Like, only half of the face, not half of the people. And over time, they measured appearance, they measured depth of wrinkles, and for some of the participants they actually measured using a punch biopsy the presence of collagen in the samples so it is proven in various instances that this in fact works what a lot of the dermatologists I spoke to said is like yes it works but here's the but it's about your expectation it's not going to make you look 20 years old again as someone who's not in her anymore. However, it can be part of a bigger and more rounded skincare routine. It's really best to make sure that your fundamentals are already in place, like daily sunscreen, a retinoid, and proper moisturization are all backed by far stronger evidence for preventing and treating signs of aging.

21:20So you can then add the light mask on top of those basics, but it shouldn't replace them. When I asked a number of different dermatologists if they used one, I got actually split responses. One of them said, of course I use it. I use it all the time. The other one said, I don't, but not because it doesn't work. I don't use it because in order for it to work, you have to use it three times a week in perpetuity because it stops working as soon as you stop using it. So if you're not able to commit to that kind of habit, then it won't work at all. Let me tell you now, I am not ready to commit. Can I take this thing off?

21:57All I can say is that I can't seem to commit to a routine of flossing, say, but I can commit to this for some reason. I've had it since January and the difference that the red light mask offers, as opposed to a lot of the other treatments that cause damage to your skin in order to try and stimulate collagen, things like microneedling where they like poke your skin to try and damage it so that your cells respond by repairing your skin. This causes, as far as the research shows to date, no damage. It can cause some minor irritation in very, very few cases, but it's safe. And if you're looking for ways to try and prolong the agelessness of your skin, this can be a good compliment.

22:43Sarah, this has been illuminating. Enlightening. Very good. Thanks. Thanks, Jason.

23:05That's it for this episode of The Intelligence. We'll see you back here tomorrow.

23:20Thank you.