Can you tell us a little bit about how this deal came about? Our colleague Maggie Haberman reported that even some of Trump's closest advisors were caught off guard by his announcement last night.

Well, everything happened in fast-forward from roundabout Sunday morning onward.

President Trump ordered US planes to bomb three key nuclear sites that Israel had not been able to destroy.

Then on Monday, Iran essentially decided to deescalate.

Instead of firing lots of missiles at lots of different American airbases and interests across the Middle East, they fired simply at one US military base in Qatar, which was seen as a kind of signal that Iran wanted to respond in a somewhat token way.

And then President Trump suddenly announced that he had brokered a deal between Israel and Iran.

The deal is a little bit murky.

I'm just wondering how what happened in Iran over the past 12 days affects the war in Gaza.

But just to start, how in your estimation has this first part of the process actually gone?

Several mini crises aside, it has gone roughly to plan, and that plan was to exchange thirty-three hostages held in Gaza by Hamas and its allies for roughly fifteen hundred Palestinian prisoners and detainees held in Israeli jails.

Just to recap, at the start of the war, Hamas and its allies raided Israel, captured roughly two hundred and fifty hostages, both dead and alive, brought them back to Gaza.

Some of them were exchanged in a previous hostage for prisoner deal in late twenty twenty-three.

A handful have been rescued in Israeli military operations, but roughly one hundred were still in captivity in January when this ceasefire was sealed.

And the deal allows for roughly a third of them, most of them alive, but some of them dead, to be swapped for Palestinian prisoners who variously had been jailed twenty years ago for their role in terrorist attacks on Israelis.

But also hundreds of Palestinians who had been arrested without charge inside Gaza by the Israeli military and held in difficult conditions inside the Israeli prison archipelago.

Tell us about those.

Why don't you start with Israel stronger?

Since last summer, Israel has had a series of military successes.

It has most obviously weakened Hamas, taken over more of the Gaza Strip, destroyed more of Hamas' infrastructure, killed more Hamas leaders, including Yahya Sinwar, the man who did more than anyone to mastermind the October 7th attack on Israel at the start of the war.

Further afield, Israel has substantially weakened Hezbollah, a key ally of Hamas in Lebanon.

It has weakened Hamas' main benefactor, Iran, destroying much of its air defenses.

And another member of the Iran-led alliance, the Syrian government, has collapsed.

So Prime Minister Netanyahu can present more or less the same deal to the Israeli public, and in particular to his far-right allies, as being less of a capitulation as it was once seen by parts of his coalition government because he and Israel are coming from a position of greater military strength.

But is that important to Israel at all? I mean, the diplomacy, you know, okay, there's the reputation, but it's not fundamentally related to its power in the region and winning, right?