On Friday morning, the International Court of Justice ordered Israel to immediately halt its military operations in Rafah. This comes less than a week after the ICC announced that it is considering arrest warrants against Prime Minister Netanyahu and Defense Minister Gallant, and days after three European countries announced that they will formally recognize a Palestinian State (that doesn’t yet exist!)

In recent days, we have had three persistent questions: One, how is it that – in just a matter of approximately 10 days – the IDF managed to move anywhere between 850,000 to a million Gazan Palestinians from Rafah to other areas of Gaza so Israel could conduct its operation against remaining Hamas battalions in Rafah? Weren’t we repeatedly told by the Biden administration that it was impossible? Our second question is about Egypt. Given what we have learned in recent days, why has Egypt escaped any real scrutiny or pressure over the past 7 months? Our third question is whether all the heat on the Israeli Government for a lack of a “day after” plan really about the pursuit of a “day after” plan, or is it about deflecting scrutiny from other failures?

Haviv Rettig Gur returns for a regular check-in, in which we analyze the emerging political scenarios that might emerge from the moves being made by Yoav Gallant, Benny Gantz and Naftali Bennett. We also discuss the implications of the crash of the helicopter transporting Iran's president -- what does it mean for Israel and other stakeholders OUTSIDE Iran and what does it mean INSIDE Iran?

Jared Cohen is Co-Head of the Office of Applied Innovation and President of Global Affairs at Goldman Sachs. He also serves on the Management Committee of the firm. Jared is also the most senior Goldman executive to visit Israel since October 7. But Jared did not just visit Israel – and meet with a range of senior Israeli political leaders and security officials – he also was in Ramallah, in the West Bank to meet Palestinian Authority officials and Jordan – just before Jordan participated in the extraordinary multi-national defense of Israel, despite tense relations between the Israeli and Jordanian governments.

Last night, Israel time, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant took the exceptional step of publicly declaring his view that the current war trajectory is leading to one of two scenarios in Gaza: Hamas rules Gaza OR the IDF rules Gaza - both, Gallant says, are catastrophic outcomes.

As Independence Day was winding down in Israel, I sat down for a conversation with Tal Becker in Jerusalem to discuss the deep uncertainty in Israeli society.

This morning I spoke with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu about a number of issues, including the coming operation in Rafah, the necessity for continued IDF operations in other parts of Gaza that the IDF had previously cleared, what makes this war so different, whether the Prime Minister is thinking seriously about the ‘day after‘ in Gaza and the contours of a Day After Plan for Gaza, how the Prime Minister is approaching the hostage negotiations, and whether exile for Hamas’s leaders (including Sinwar) could be part of a final deal to get the hostages home.

Sheryl Sandberg is one of the most accomplished executives in the tech industry. Since 10/07, Sheryl has been focused on one cause – Israel and the Jewish phttps://www.screamsbeforesilence.comeople. Sheryl has been confronting: Rape Denialism. She has done this primarily through a documentary film she created called "Screams Before Silence", which you can watch on YouTube here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zAr9oGSXgak&t=1456s. You can also learn more about the film here: https://www.screamsbeforesilence.com. In this conversation, Sheryl and I discuss how Judaism and Israel had shaped or fit into her life before 10/07, how 10/07 changed her, and how she came to create this film and commit to this cause.

What exactly unfolded in Israel over the past 72 hours? Details are still emerging, but at one point it appeared that all sides may have been close to reaching a hostage/temporary ceasefire deal. Except that we now know that Israel had made major concessions in one deal, while Hamas was agreeing to an entirely different -- and new -- deal, so there wasn't actually any kind of agreement to speak of. All against the backdrop of the IDF commencing its operation in Rafah. And, what is Israel doing at the Rafah border with Egypt and what are the implications for Israel-Egypt relations?

In our conversation and in his new book, The New York Times’ Frank Bruni addresses the fact that Jews are being blamed for objecting to the 10/07 massacre of Jews. How did this happen? It didn’t come out of nowhere? How is it the college campuses have become the focus of this debate over here?

There are two major decisions Israel is contending with right now: I) proceed with the military operation in Rafah; or II) pause the fighting, perhaps for an extended period of time, in service of a hostage deal. Of course a hostage deal would also most likely include the release of a large number of Palestinian prisoners from Israeli prisons.

After over 200 days, Rachel Goldberg and Jon Polin saw proof of life of their son Hersh Goldberg-Polin for the first time, who was severely wounded in the October 7th massacre and taken hostage by Hamas.

Michael Powell has been covering New York City life and politics for decades, as a long-time reporter for the New York Times, the Washington Post, and now the Atlantic. He recently was on Columbia’s campus to try to better understand the encampment movement that has taken over the campus. He joins us to report what he saw and learned.

Since 10/07, no faculty member at Columbia University (or any university for that matter) has been more outspoken about the shocking and staggering rise in antisemitism than Shai Avidai. He brings his first-hand accounts to our conversation today.

A lot is happening, but is Israel closer to achieving the war's objectives?

Just about every day we’re asked: how did Israel lose the story?We wanted to put this question to an expert in marketing and storytelling, but could come at Israel’s story with some distance. Someone who wasn’t inherently hostile to Israel but also wasn’t a cheerleader.

To help us understand what happened overnight in Israel, our guest today is NADAV EYAL, who returns to the podcast. He is a columnist for Yediot. Eyal has been covering Middle-Eastern and international politics for the last two decades for Israeli radio, print and television news.

There has been growing tension within Israeli society over where to prioritize a hostage deal – at what cost (in terms of how many and which Palestinian prisoners from Israeli prisons should be part of the deal and the length of any temporary ceasefire). At the same time, the sense of urgency behind Israel's hostage cause in capitals around the world is…drifting. Not disappearing, but drifting. A turning point seemed to be when the UN Security Council passed a resolution – 14-0 (made possible by a US decision not to veto) – that, for the first time, did not call for a ceasefire that was conditioned on the return of the hostages. It’s a sense we get from families of hostages, who are in regular contact with media, NGOs and governments around the world. It’s against that backdrop, that we sat down in person with Maya Roman, who was in New York and Washington, DC.