By John Haltiwanger and Rishi Iyengar
Welcome back to Foreign Policy’s Situation Report. We’ve got some exciting news: Rishi is officially teaming up with John as co-author of the newsletter. Rishi is a Manchester United supporter; John is a Liverpool FC supporter. We are proof that people can overcome their differences and work together. There’s still hope for the world!
Alright, here’s what’s on tap for the day: A Palestinian American peace advocate discusses the war in Gaza, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio axes the team that tracks foreign disinformation, and Nvidia gets grilled over chip sales to China.
Have feedback? Hit reply to let us know your thoughts.
Israeli military tanks positioned along Israel’s southern border with the northern Gaza Strip on March 19.Jack Guez/AFP via Getty Images
It’s been roughly a month since phase one of the cease-fire between Israel and Hamas ended without the two sides agreeing to a phase two deal, and Israel restarted air and ground attacks in Gaza. Israel has escalated its operation there in the time since, while continuing to block humanitarian aid from entering the enclave.
Israel put forward a new cease-fire proposal this week, which included a call for Hamas to disarm. The militant group rejected it, but on Thursday said it’s willing to release all remaining hostages as part of a deal to end the war and in exchange for Palestinian prisoners. Meanwhile, Israel’s defense minister on Wednesday said that troops will indefinitely remain in “security zones” in Gaza to act “as a buffer between the enemy and (Israeli) communities.”
SitRep recently spoke with Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib, a Palestinian American peace activist who spearheads the Atlantic Council’s Realign for Palestine project, about the current humanitarian situation in Gaza, recent protests in the enclave against Hamas, and where he thinks the war is heading.
Alkhatib, who spent much of his childhood in Gaza, has lost 33 family members in Israel’s bombardment of the enclave. Yet he remains a passionate advocate for having a more nuanced dialogue on one of the world’s most divisive conflicts.
Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
SitRep: You’ve lost family members in this conflict, and all of this is obviously deeply personal for you. How are you holding up?
Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib: I am struggling, to be honest. On the one hand, I was able to get some family members out. My mom’s out, my sister-in-law is out, and I got four nieces and nephews out. My brother’s still there. I was just talking to him earlier this morning, basically begging him to decide to go. He’s the field director for one of the biggest British medical NGOs [nongovernmental organizations] on the ground in Gaza, and things are horrendous. He’s based in Khan Younis in southern Gaza. Things are really awful.
The city of Rafah is gone. People are being vaporized in Gaza. The Israeli war strategy right now is like they can’t get rid of Gazans, but it appears that there’s an effort to basically concentrate them in certain areas and potentially let malnutrition and starvation do the rest. So, things are tough on that front.
SR: Have you been encouraged by the recent protests against Hamas in Gaza?
AFA: Absolutely. I have been both immensely optimistic but also extraordinarily frustrated and disheartened by the dismissal of these protests as effectively inconvenient timing-wise for the so-called pro-Palestine movement who are singularly focused on Israel’s role without giving space for nuance and understanding that Hamas is inseparable from Israel. Hamas is the reason why Gaza is being annihilated and reoccupied.
The people of Gaza are completely against Hamas and against the group’s terror and the squandering of their lives and resources for absolutely nothing. The people of Gaza are completely against the suicidal nihilism and the death cultism and the fascist Nazism of Hamas that has destroyed the Palestinian national project.
SR: Are you concerned that Israel’s moving toward a long-term occupation of Gaza and perhaps even a return to settlements and annexation?
AFA: Without a doubt. I sat down with some who are part of [far-right politician and Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel] Smotrich’s party, and I was sharing with them ideas I had about stabilizing the [Gaza] Strip, and they were in my face telling me [that]. In the first half of the conversation, they were talking about the need for the Strip to lose half of its territory and just be annexed by Israel as a way to show the Palestinians consequences. Then the second part was like: Well, it wouldn’t be so bad for settlements to be created in northern Gaza. And from their perspective, northern Gaza is where a lot of the deadly Hamas presence has been, so therefore that’s where they need to build settlements.
That said, having had extensive conversations with a large number of Israelis who are part of the national security apparatus, that remains a minority view. The interest is in neutering the security threats that are emanating from Gaza, rather than actually looking to really have long-term settlements in Gaza. However, in terms of a longtime occupation in Gaza, that seems quite likely, because any mention of the Palestinian Authority remains taboo because any connectivity with the West Bank brings up the thought of the two-state solution.
I am completely, completely terrified about the prospect of direct military occupation killing the hope of Gaza’s rejuvenation and reconstitution. I don’t want just [for] Gaza to be rebuilt. I want it to be reconstituted. I’m terrified about the consequences in terms of loss of life, and I’m terrified that’s going to potentially keep Hamas relevant because that’s actually what they ultimately desire.
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America Can’t Do It All
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Veteran Jimmie T. Smith argues that America’s role in Ukraine is reckless and distracts from higher priorities like deterring China. As peace talks inch forward, he calls for a foreign policy rooted in realism and restraint—and for Europe to take responsibility for its own defense. Read his thoughts here.
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There have been a slew of departures at the Defense Department this week, Politico reported, with the Pentagon’s former top spokesperson, John Ullyot, confirming his resignation. That’s after the suspensions of three officials over allegations of leaking sensitive military information, including Dan Caldwell, a senior aide to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth; Darin Selnick, the department’s deputy chief of staff; and Colin Carroll, the chief of staff to Deputy Defense Secretary Stephen Feinberg.
What should be high on your radar, if it isn’t already.
Rubio axes disinfo team. Rubio has disbanded a State Department team dedicated to tracking disinformation from U.S. adversaries such as Russia, China, and Iran. The Counter Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference office, also known as R/FIMI, was a successor to the Global Engagement Center (GEC) set up under the Obama administration to counter propaganda from extremist organizations.
But Rubio, in his statement announcing the closure, claimed it “spent millions of dollars to actively silence and censor the voices of Americans they were supposed to be serving.” The GEC had become a lightning rod for U.S. conservatives who claimed that it was being used to silence right-wing voices, even prompting a lawsuit by two U.S. right-wing outlets and the attorney general of Texas in 2023.
Trump nixed Israel’s Iran attack plan. U.S. President Donald Trump stopped Israel from attacking Iran’s nuclear sites as his administration continues to negotiate a deal with Tehran to curb its nuclear program, the New York Times reported. Those negotiations are in full swing, as we wrote in last week’s newsletter, with Trump’s Middle East envoy, Steve Witkoff, meeting Iranian negotiators in Oman last weekend and set to continue those talks later this week.
Nvidia faces more China questions. The U.S. House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party on Wednesday sent a formal letter to U.S. semiconductor giant Nvidia and its CEO, Jensen Huang, demanding details of the company’s sales of chips to China. The letter follows a new report released by the committee that found that Chinese artificial intelligence company DeepSeek may have used Nvidia chips to develop its latest AI model.
Nvidia said in a statement that it follows “the government’s directions to the letter,” adding that the products in question were not shipped to China. “The technology industry supports America when it exports to well-known companies worldwide—if the government felt otherwise, it would instruct us,” the company said.
Huang flew to Beijing on Thursday to meet with Chinese trade officials, days after the Trump administration issued additional export restrictions on the types of chips that Nvidia is authorized to sell to China. “We regularly meet with government leaders to discuss our company’s products and technology,” a Nvidia spokesperson told SitRep when asked about the trip.
U.S. President Donald Trump meets with Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, D.C., on April 14.Win McNamee/Getty Images
Monday, April 21: U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance and his wife, Usha, touch down in India for a four-day visit in which the VP is scheduled to meet Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
Tuesday, April 22: The International Monetary Fund (IMF) will launch its latest World Economic Outlook, as part of the IMF and World Bank spring meetings taking place in Washington, D.C., all week (keep an eye out for burner phones).
It is also your new SitRep co-author’s birthday. Please clap.
Wednesday, April 23: A U.S. federal court’s deadline for the Trump administration to respond to the judge’s finding of probable cause for contempt of court for ignoring an order to pause deportation flights of immigrants.
It is also the deadline for Mahmoud Khalil, the Columbia University graduate and pro-Palestinian activist arrested by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement last month, to appeal for a waiver stopping his deportation. Another Columbia activist, Mohsen Mahdawi—arrested in Vermont this week while arriving for his U.S. citizenship interview—will have his first court hearing on the same day.
Thursday, April 24: Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky visits South Africa.
Our colleagues host the FP Solutions Summit on the sidelines of the World Bank and IMF spring meetings in Washington, D.C.
“I don’t think this lay-low-and-hope-this-blows-over approach is the right one for the moment we’re in.”
—Chris Krebs, a former U.S. cybersecurity official whom Trump has ordered the Justice Department to investigate for his declaration that the 2020 election wasn’t stolen, to the Wall Street Journal on his plan to fight back.
Remember the Fyre Festival? The much-hyped 2017 “luxury” music festival in the Bahamas that ended up just being run-down tents on the beach and soggy Styrofoam-box sandwiches, a festival whose spectacular implosion led to founder Billy McFarland being sentenced to six years in prison for fraud and prompted not one but two documentaries?
It seems they’re at it again.
Fyre Festival 2, which McFarland started planning soon after his 2022 early release from prison, was scheduled to take place in Mexico’s Playa Del Carmen at the end of May but has now been postponed indefinitely after local officials said they had “no record or planning of any such event.”
