Morning Report — Cease-fire talks pick up between Israel, Hamas

Nearly seven months into Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza, White House officials are making progress in their push for a temporary cease-fire.

Speaking Monday in Saudi Arabia, Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Hamas should accept an “extraordinarily generous” proposal to release Israeli hostages it is holding in Gaza in exchange for a temporary cease-fire. The administration has not been public with the details of the latest proposal, although a senior administration official told reporters on a call Friday that baked into the proposal is to allow for the “structured” and “phased” return of Palestinians to the north of Gaza.

“And in this moment, the only thing standing between the people of Gaza and a cease-fire is Hamas. They have to decide, and they have to decide quickly,” Blinken said. “I’m hopeful that they will make the right decision.”

Hamas officials have left Cairo following talks with Egyptian officials, who are serving as moderators alongside Qatar. State media reports they are expected to return with a written response to the cease-fire proposal, though it’s unclear when. President Biden on Monday called the leaders from both countries to speak about the latest developments the negotiations.

The window for a possible deal — the first since a weeklong truce in November — could be short. The administration is pressing for a cease-fire deal before Israel can begin its long-threatened attack on Rafah — the southern Gaza city where more than a million displaced Palestinians are seeking shelter. But the White House has been in this position before over the last several months, repeatedly expressing optimism only to see the chances for a deal collapse.

Sameh Shoukry, Egypt’s foreign minister, said Monday that he was “hopeful” about the latest cease-fire proposal, but did not say what it involved or who had proposed it. The New York Times reports that for months, Israel had demanded that Hamas release at least 40 hostages to secure a new truce. Now the Israeli government is prepared to settle for only 33, as Israel now believes some of the elderly people, women and children may have died in captivity.

The Biden administration — already struggling with its response to Israel’s war in Gaza and facing several inflammatory developments at home and abroad — would welcome a cease-fire. In the U.S., student protests are continuing at campuses across the country.

And the International Criminal Court (ICC) is considering issuing arrest warrants — to members of the Israeli government as well as Hamas leaders — over alleged war crimes committed during the conflict. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu asked Biden on Sunday to help prevent the ICC from issuing arrest warrants for senior Israeli officials in connection with the war in Gaza. The White House maintained Monday that the ICC “lacks jurisdiction” to prosecute Israel.

Neither the United States nor Israel is among the ICC’s 124 member nations, and the chances of Israel giving up any member of its government to be prosecuted pursuant to a warrant are effectively zero. At its core, the court’s case is that the Israeli counterattack after the Oct. 7 assault has been brutal and indiscriminate, and that some strikes by the Israeli military, as well as the restriction of humanitarian aid, have violated international law.

The ICC “is doing their [sic] job, which is to hold people accountable for international crimes and war crimes — which the Netanyahu regime and senior members of that government have been doing for months,” Usamah Andrabi, spokesperson for the progressive group Justice Democrats told The Hill’s Niall Stanage in “The Memo.”

“I would question as to why anyone thinks the ICC does not have jurisdiction over the exact sort of crimes that they are supposed to have jurisdiction over — or why those governments who are not part of the ICC have any say as to who is or isn’t part of the jurisdiction,” he said.

Meanwhile, the administration is required to send Congress a report by May 8 that renders a judgment about whether Israel is breaching the terms of a U.S. order that makes military aid dependent on abiding by standards dealing with international law and humanitarian aid. A group of lawyers in the U.S. and abroad — including at least 20 that work in the Biden administration — are calling on the president to halt military aid to Israel, arguing that its actions in Gaza do not comply with U.S. and international humanitarian law.

The letter comes as the State Department has determined that at least five Israeli military units were involved in gross violations of human rights, but is holding back on imposing any consequences amid discussions with the Israeli government. State Department spokesperson Vedant Patel said the violations are specific to Israel’s military operations in the West Bank and predate the current war against Hamas.

“This continues to be an ongoing process, and if at any point remediation efforts or things like that are found to be inconsistent with the standards that we find, there — of course — will be a restriction on applicable U.S. assistance,” Patel said. “We intend to be an administration that’s going to follow the laws prescribed.”

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LEADING THE DAY

POLITICS

Independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is competing for some of the same voter base as former President Trump in an unpredictable three-way race. That has attracted Trump’s attention. Kennedy, meanwhile, has called the former president “unhinged” and “barely coherent.” The social media back and forth between the two men against a backdrop of recent polls marginally favorable to Kennedy scrambles the conventional wisdom that the challenger with the famous name would be a bigger risk to Biden than the Republican former president.

Decision Desk HQ’s aggregate of polling over the past few weeks paints a more complicated picture. While Trump sees his lead over Biden grow with Kennedy included in some polling questions, the gap narrowed last week, and at one point Biden and Trump appeared in a dead heat in a hypothetical three-way race with Kennedy.

Meanwhile, the Kennedy team says he qualified Monday to be on the California ballot in November. Gaining access to ballots in 50 states is his goal — a costly endeavor for his campaign and for the super PAC supporting him, The New York Times reports. He’s on ballots in Utah, swing state Michigan and Hawaii. His campaign says he will soon be on ballots in New Hampshire, North Carolina and Nevada.

Voters chilly to the major party presumptive nominees are known in the polling world as “double haters,” and hypothetically open to alternative candidates.

“Support for Kennedy is not particularly strong even among voters who dislike both Biden and Trump,” said Patrick Murray, director of the independent Monmouth University Polling Institute. “The poll results suggest that the Kennedy effect is minimal.” If the independent challenger can’t do well among those voters who give both Biden and Trump the cold shoulder, “it’s unclear what role he can play in this election other than as a spoiler,” Murray added. The spoiler impact has become a new worry for Trump.

▪ The Hill: The former president leads Biden in major battleground states, according to Emerson College Polling/The Hill surveys of registered voters released this morning. Trump boasts slim, single-digit advantages in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — all within each survey’s margin of error

▪ The Hill: “She’s DOA”: South Dakota Republican Gov. Kristi Noem’s dog tale sinks her chances of becoming Trump’s VP.

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ZOOM IN

TRUMP WORLD

TRUMP’S CRIMINAL TRIAL RESUMES TODAY with a deep dive into the paperwork behind Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s (D) prosecution of the former president on 34 criminal charges of falsifying business records. In presenting the case, prosecutors have mixed the bawdy and boring for jurors, The Hill’s Zach Schonfeld and Ella Lee report.

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ADMINISTRATION

Vice President Harris is making a new effort to energize Black voters in battleground states this week, heading to Atlanta on Monday for the kickoff of a national economic tour to highlight how the White House says its policies are helping a critical constituency for Democrats in November. Speaking to a largely Black crowd, Harris laid out ways that she and Biden have sought to improve Black Americans’ upward mobility and help them realize their business ambitions.

It’s part of a concerted effort by the White House to win back disappointed Americans by putting kitchen table issues at the front of the president’s agenda.

“I need the help of the leaders who are here to get the word out so people know what is available to them,” she said during a conversation at the Georgia International Convention Center.

Harris’s tour will also seek to engage Black men, whom Democrats are courting as polls show them softening in their support for Biden (The New York Times, USA Today and The Hill).

Biden said last week that he would take another stab at trying to pass border security legislation that had been cut during negotiations over the congressional foreign aid package. Talks about revisiting the Senate’s bipartisan border compromise from February have been all but nonexistent in recent weeks. But administration officials and immigration policy experts told Politico it’s highly unlikely for any legislative momentum for border security to materialize before the election.

“They pulled a rabbit out of a hat on Ukraine, but there’s no chance they’re getting anything out of [Speaker] Mike Johnson’s [R-La.] House on border security,” an immigration advocate said. “They’ve known that since December, when they realized they had to count votes in the House. There’s no chance of legislation on this, and they know that. It’s rhetorical posturing.”

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ELSEWHERE

INTERNATIONAL

MOON MISSION: China will send a robotic spacecraft on a round trip to the moon’s far side in the coming days. The mission marks the first of three technically demanding trips that will pave the way for an inaugural Chinese-crewed landing and a base on the lesser-explored lunar south pole. The polar plans have worried NASA, whose administrator, Bill Nelson, has repeatedly warned that China would claim any water resources as its own.

Beijing says it remains committed to cooperation with all nations on building a “shared” future, though its space agency is prohibited by U.S. law from cooperating with NASA (Reuters).

As companies work to beef up global supply chains for metals and minerals essential to fossil fuel-free energy production, they’re moving production away from China, where the industry has been concentrated for decades. At stake in the quest for mineral resources is everything from an international environmental ban on scraping the ocean floor to labor norms in developing countries where mining operations have long been criticized by human rights groups (The Hill).

Robert Storch, the Defense Department’s inspector general (IG), has a little-discussed but monumental job in Washington. He oversees one of the largest organizations in the world, conducting oversight of the Pentagon. Storch’s colossal duties have only grown as the U.S. supports Ukraine in the fight against Russia, and after Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin’s hospitalization scandal earlier this year. But the Office of the Inspector General for the Defense Department is up for the task, which Storch calls an “incredible responsibility.”

The U.S. has sent more than $113 billion in aid to Kyiv since Russia invaded, and Biden just signed another $61 billion into law. In January, Storch’s office released a report that showed the Pentagon has not properly tracked around $1 billion of weapons sent to Ukraine, but he says both Washington and Kyiv are generally handling the process responsibly.

“They all get the importance of accountability and transparency regarding U.S. assistance,” he told The Hill’s Brad Dress. “It’s just common sense that [Ukraine] would understand the importance of accountability and transparency to ensure that donor countries are willing to keep giving them stuff.”

The Hill: Ukrainian troops have made a tactical retreat from three more villages as Russian forces press forward across the eastern front line and take advantage of Kyiv’s exhausted military, which is desperately awaiting the arrival of new U.S. assistance.

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THE CLOSER

And finally … 🐶 Is there a workplace in Washington more desperately in need of therapy, any kind of therapy, than the Capitol? It’s National Therapy Animal Day, and that means lawmakers and their staff members can meet the calming, forgiving, empathic, silky soft, nonpartisan and mostly nonverbal pets trained to lower blood pressure and inspire smiles at the Senate Visitors Center today.

“Animal-assisted interventions” are on the schedule, thanks to event hosts Pet Partners, Pet Advocacy Network and Pet Food Institute. 🐾

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