Israeli leader says future ceasefire negotiations will 'only take place under fire'.

Israel's PM warns "this is only the beginning" after deadly strikes on Gaza that broke a ceasefire with Hamas.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has warned Hamas that Israel’s breaking of the Gaza ceasefire is “only the beginning.”

The Israeli hardliner had resigned in January in protest of the Gaza ceasefire deal.

Hamas says attacks 'overturn' ceasefire, as families of Israeli captives accuse Netanyahu of ‘giving up on hostages'.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has pushed for a vote to fire his internal security chief.

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The idea that millions of dead Americans are receiving Social Security checks is shocking, and bolsters the argument that the federal bureaucracy needs radical change to combat waste and fraud. There’s one big problem: No evidence exists that it’s true.

Despite being told by agency staff last month that this claim has no basis in fact, Elon Musk and President Donald Trump have continued to use the talking point as a pretext to attack America’s highest-spending government program. Musk seems to have gotten this idea from a list of Social Security recipients who did not have a death date attached to their record. Agency employees reportedly explained to Musk’s DOGE team in February that the list of impossibly ancient individuals they found were not necessarily receiving benefits (the lack of death dates was related to an outdated system).

And yet, in his speech to Congress last week, Trump stated: “Believe it or not, government databases list 4.7 million Social Security members from people aged 100 to 109 years old.” He said the list includes “3.5 million people from ages 140 to 149,” among other 100-plus age ranges, and that “money is being paid to many of them, and we’re searching right now.” In an interview with Fox Business on Monday, Musk discussed the existence of “20 million people who are definitely dead, marked as alive” in the Social Security database. And DOGE has dispatched 10 employees to try to find evidence of the claims that dead Americans are receiving checks, according to documents filed in court on Wednesday.

Musk and Trump have long maintained that they do not plan to attack Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, the major entitlement programs. But their repeated claims that rampant fraud exists within these entitlement systems undermine those assurances. In his Fox interview on Monday, Musk said, “Waste and fraud in entitlement spending—which is most of the federal spending, is entitlements—so that’s like the big one to eliminate. That’s the sort of half trillion, maybe $600, $700 billion a year.” Some observers interpreted this confusing sentence to mean that Musk wants to cut the entitlement programs themselves. But the Trump administration quickly downplayed Musk’s comments, insisting that the federal government will continue to protect such programs and suggesting that Musk had been talking about the need to eliminate fraud in the programs, not about axing them. “What kind of a person doesn’t support eliminating waste, fraud, and abuse in government spending?” the White House asked in a press release.

The White House’s question would be a lot easier to answer if Musk, who has called Social Security a “Ponzi scheme,” wasn’t wildly overestimating the amount of fraud in entitlement programs. Musk is claiming waste in these programs on the order of hundreds of billions of dollars a year, but a 2024 Social Security Administration report found that the agency lost closer to $70 billion total in improper payments from 2015 to 2022, which accounts for about 1 percent of Social Security payments. Leland Dudek, a mid-level civil servant elevated to temporarily lead Social Security after being put on administrative leave for sharing information with DOGE, pushed back last week on the idea that the agency is overrun with fraud and that dead people older than 100 are getting payments, ProPublica reported after obtaining a recording of a closed-door meeting. DOGE’s false claim about dead people receiving benefits “got in front of us,” one of Dudek’s deputies reportedly said, but “it’s a victory that you’re not seeing more [misinformation], because they are being educated.” (Dudek did not respond to ProPublica’s request for comment.)

Some 7 million Americans rely on Social Security benefits for more than 90 percent of their income, and 54 million individuals and their dependents receive retirement payments from the agency. Even if Musk doesn’t eliminate the agency, his tinkering could still affect all of those Americans’ lives. On Wednesday, DOGE dialed back its plans to cut off much of Social Security’s phone services (a commonly used alternative to its online programs, particularly for elderly and disabled Americans), though it still plans to restrict recipients’ ability to change bank-deposit information over the phone.

In recent weeks, confusion has rippled through the Social Security workforce and the public; many people drop off forms in person, but office closures could disrupt that. According to ProPublica, several IT contracts have been cut or scaled back, and several employees reported that their tech systems are crashing every day. Thousands of jobs are being cut, including in regional field offices, and the entire Social Security staff has been offered buyouts (today is the deadline for workers to take them). Martin O’Malley, a former commissioner of the agency, has warned that the workforce reductions that DOGE is seeking at Social Security could trigger “system collapse and an interruption of benefits” within the next one to three months.

In going anywhere near Social Security—in saying the agency’s name in the same sentence as the word eliminate—Musk is venturing further than any presidential administration has in recent decades. Entitlement benefits are extremely popular, and cutting the programs has long been a nonstarter. When George W. Bush raised the idea of partially privatizing entitlements in 2005, the proposal died before it could make it to a vote in the House or Senate.

The DOGE plan to cut $1 trillion in spending while leaving entitlements, which make up the bulk of the federal budget, alone always seemed implausible. In the November Wall Street Journal op-ed announcing the DOGE initiative, Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy (who is no longer part of DOGE) wrote that those who say “we can’t meaningfully close the federal deficit without taking aim at entitlement programs” are deflecting “attention from the sheer magnitude of waste, fraud and abuse” that “DOGE aims to address.” But until there’s clear evidence that this “magnitude” of fraud exists within Social Security, such claims enable Musk to poke at what was previously untouchable.

Related:

DOGE’s fuzzy math Is DOGE losing steam?

Here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

Democrats have a man problem. There was a second name on Rubio’s target list. The crimson face of Canadian anger The GOP’s fears about Musk are growing.

Today’s News

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said that Democrats will support a Republican-led short-term funding bill to help avoid a government shutdown. A federal judge ruled that probationary employees fired by 18 federal agencies must be temporarily rehired. Mark Carney was sworn in as Canada’s prime minister, succeeding Justin Trudeau as the Liberals’ leader.

Dispatches

Atlantic Intelligence: The Trump administration is embracing AI. “Work is being automated, people are losing their jobs, and it’s not at all clear that any of this will make the government more efficient,” Damon Beres writes. The Books Briefing: Half a decade on, we now have at least a small body of literary work that takes on COVID, Maya Chung writes.

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Evening Read

Illustration by John Gall*

I’d Had Jobs Before, but None Like This

By Graydon Carter

I stayed with my aunt the first night and reported to the railroad’s headquarters at 7 o’clock the next morning with a duffel bag of my belongings: a few pairs of shorts, jeans, a jacket, a couple of shirts, a pair of Kodiak work boots, and some Richard Brautigan and Jack Kerouac books, acceptable reading matter for a pseudo-sophisticate of the time. The Symington Yard was one of the largest rail yards in the world. On some days, it held 7,000 boxcars. Half that many moved in and out on a single day. Like many other young men my age, I was slim, unmuscled, and soft. In the hall where they interviewed and inspected the candidates for line work, I blanched as I looked over a large poster that showed the outline of a male body and the prices the railroad paid if you lost a part of it. As I recall, legs brought you $750 apiece. Arms were $500. A foot brought a mere $250. In Canadian dollars.

Read the full article.

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The kind of thing dictators do Trump is unleashing a chaos economy. RFK Jr. has already broken his vaccine promise. The NIH’s grant terminations are “utter and complete chaos.” Netanyahu doesn’t want the truth to come out. Republicans tear down a Black Lives Matter mural.

Culture Break

Music Box Films

Watch. The film Eephus (in select theaters) is a “slow movie” in the best possible way, David Sims writes.

Read. Novels about women’s communities tend toward utopian coexistence or ruthless backbiting. The Unworthy does something more interesting, Hillary Kelly writes.

Play our daily crossword.

Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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Israeli leader says he no longer has 'trust' in the head of the domestic security agency.

If there’s one thing most Israelis agree on after nearly a year and a half of war, it’s the need for a deep, impartial investigation into the catastrophe of October 7—laying bare what went wrong that day, beforehand, and possibly after. The demand for such an inquiry has escalated, voiced in equal measure by gaunt ex-hostages and the outgoing, guilt-ridden, military chief of staff.

And if there is one thing that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu does not want, it is such an investigation. The reason isn’t hard to fathom. A serious probe will likely hold Netanyahu responsible for Hamas catching Israel unprepared. Its conclusions could echo the signs directed at the prime minister at street protests: You’re the boss. You’re guilty.

Commissions of inquiry are the normal mechanism by which Israeli governance reckons with its response to extraordinary events. The procedure for creating one is enshrined in law: The cabinet votes to create the commission and defines the scope of its inquiry. The chief justice of the supreme court appoints the members, and a senior judge or retired judge chairs. In the weightiest investigations, the chief justice has chaired the commission. The panel can subpoena witnesses and documents. It can find individuals responsible for actions and omissions. The findings aren’t criminal convictions, but they can include recommendations to dismiss high officials.

[Yair Rosenberg: Why 70 percent of Israelis want Netanyahu to resign]

The best-known inquiry commissions have near-mythic status in Israeli memory. One investigated how Israel was taken by surprise at the start of the 1973 Yom Kippur War, and its preliminary report sparked the resignation or dismissal first of top generals and then of Prime Minister Golda Meir, ending her career.

Another examined Israel’s role in the 1982 massacre, by a Lebanese Christian militia, of Palestinians in the refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila in Beirut. The inquiry’s most resounding conclusion was that Defense Minister Ariel Sharon bore “personal responsibility,” because he “ignored the danger of acts of revenge and bloodshed” by the militia. Sharon resigned. Even when he became prime minister many years later, he did not hold the defense post again, as some prime ministers have done.

With rare exceptions, the law on commissions of inquiry requires the government to decide to investigate itself. This is the procedure’s weakness, but popular pressure has historically proved effective in forcing the government’s hand. Meir decided to create the commission that ultimately forced her out in response to the public anger, spurred by army reservists returning home from the front. Prime Minister Menachem Begin’s government understood that it needed to act after an estimated 400,000 demonstrators flooded central Tel Aviv in what was then the largest protest the country had ever seen.

This history best explains why the public today expects an inquiry commission, and why Netanyahu resists appointing one: Disasters beget commissions, and commissions can beget upheaval.

Polling shows that up to 83 percent of Israelis, including a large majority of voters for parties in the ruling coalition, want a state inquiry into October 7. And in recent days, pressure for an inquiry has grown. One reason is that a slew of internal army investigations have been released, probing, among other things, the failure to defend border communities on the morning of the attack, and the years of overly sanguine assessments of Hamas.

Those inquiries reinforce earlier press reports based on leaks and add frightening detail. The Military Intelligence Directorate had stopped listening in real time to Hamas walkie-talkies. It had acquired Hamas’s plan for an invasion of Israel—and dismissed it as purely aspirational. Completely misreading Hamas, the army believed that it was deterred from attacking Israel by the outcome of previous fighting. That bias led it to dismiss multiple signs of the impending attack in the hours before it began.

The army’s investigation and a parallel one by the Shin Bet counterintelligence agency lay out those bodies’ mistakes. Only obliquely, though, do they say anything about the decisions or negligence of the government. This makes sense; an army investigation of elected leaders would have the scent of a coup. But the publication of the army probes draws attention to the government’s refusal to be investigated.

It also fits a pattern. Generals have acknowledged that they let the country down; Netanyahu hasn’t. The military chief of staff on October 7 and after, Herzi Halevi, resigned just after the current cease-fire began in January and left office last week. The disaster occurred “on my watch, and I bear responsibility,” Halevi said when he turned over command. Then he added—pointedly, as Netanyahu was present—“It’s not right that only the Israel Defense Forces investigate an event like this. Establishing a state commission of inquiry is necessary and essential.”

Early this month, opposition parties managed to force the Knesset to hold a debate on establishing a state commission. An opposition parliamentarian read a letter from Yarden Bibas, who was taken captive on October 7 and released in the first stage of the now-stalled hostage deal. Bibas was still observing the traditional Jewish week of mourning for his murdered wife and two small children, whose bodies had been returned from Gaza. “I call on you, Mr. Prime Minister,” Bibas wrote, to “unite the people of Israel, bring peace to our souls, fulfill the will of the people and the [victims’] families. Announce today the establishment of a state commission of inquiry.”

Netanyahu was required to respond, and he did so with a speech of more than half an hour that included jibes at the opposition and an attempt to link the former prime minister and outspoken government critic Ehud Barak to Jeffrey Epstein. On the inquiry issue itself, he conceded that “it’s crucial to investigate thoroughly everything that happened on October 7.” But, he claimed, a state commission would be “politically tilted” and its “conclusions known in advance.”

What he and “a majority of the people” wanted, he said, was an “objective, balanced” inquiry panel. He appeared to be referring to plans that his inner circle had reportedly floated to get around the commission law, possibly by establishing an ad hoc parliamentary panel with coalition and opposition members. Under the commission law, Chief Justice Yitzhak Amit would choose the panel, and the retired chief justice Esther Hayut could conceivably chair it. The prime minister and his coalition regard both judges as too liberal—and too independent. But what they seem to be suggesting instead is to choose the panel on the basis of party, which would be overtly political, as well as lacking the long precedent and settled law of a state commission.

[Read: How Netanyahu misread his relationship with Trump]

Netanyahu was prime minister for 13 of the 14 years before October 7. A commission of inquiry might look into his strategic choice to allow Hamas to remain in control of Gaza as a means of keeping the Palestinians divided. It might also determine whether the notion that Hamas had been deterred, and so did not pose an immediate threat, was the army’s and that Netanyahu simply failed to question it—or whether generals shaped their evaluations to fit what the prime minister wanted to hear. Such an inquiry could determine what warning signs the prime minister may have ignored in the days and years before the catastrophe.

In Israel, a state commission of inquiry is not merely a judicial instrument or a means of settling facts. It’s a ritual of national closure that allows people to put events in order and move on. The commission’s summary of errors and of horrors, its assessment of culpability, its recommendations for the future—all of these help turn trauma into history.

Netanyahu is more aware than anyone of what an inquiry might discover beyond what the public already knows. The longer and more insistently he opposes a state commission, the more he reinforces the expectation that he will be weighed in the balance and found wanting.

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“We will win!” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer chanted at a rally last month protesting Elon Musk’s U.S. DOGE Service infiltrating Treasury Department payments systems. If Democrats want to win, though, they’ll have to fight first, and they don’t seem totally ready for that.

Schumer says that his caucus will refuse to vote for a short-term funding bill that would prevent the government from shutting down at 12:01 a.m. on Saturday. (In the House, all but one Democrat—Jared Golden of Maine—voted against the funding patch, but Republicans were unexpectedly united and passed the bill.) But no one seems to completely believe that Democrats will keep up their unified opposition. Politico reports that Democrats may instead settle for a symbolic vote on a shorter-term bill that they know they’ll lose: A White House official told the publication, “They’re 100 percent gonna swallow it. They’re totally screwed.”

Democratic leaders have been insisting that the nation is facing a serious crisis caused by President Donald Trump’s blitzkrieg demolition of the executive branch and rule of law. But they have also complained that they have few paths to stop Trump. “I’m trying to figure out what leverage we actually have,” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries said last month. “What leverage do we have?” Now Senate Democrats have leverage, and what they do with it will show whether they mean what they say.

This is a strange situation for Democrats: As the party that likes to keep government running, even entertaining the idea of a shutdown is novel. But they have reasons related to both policy and politics to take a hard line here. First, if they’re concerned with protecting government services that are essential for citizens, they need to find some way to slow Trump down, because he’s using his power to slash them already. If the government shuts down, some services will be briefly cut. If Democrats keep the government open, some services will be cut—perhaps permanently. The deadline gives them a chance to demand that the White House agree to limitations on DOGE or other Trump cuts in exchange for funding the government. (Complicating the calculus, the White House recently deleted guidance from its website on how a shutdown would work.)

Even if Congress passes the GOP’s short-term funding patch, there’s no guarantee that the administration will comply. Trump and his budget director, Russ Vought, have argued that the president should be able to impound funds—in other words, to treat congressional appropriations as a ceiling rather than a requirement, and thus be able to cut funding for whatever they don’t like. (This is plainly illegal, but Vought and others believe that the law that bans it is unconstitutional, and they hope to challenge it in the courts.) This means that simply continuing to fund the government doesn’t guarantee that key programs will stay running, and that extracting concessions from the White House now is crucial.

Cautious Democrats worry that the party will be blamed if the government closes. But blamed by whom? Republicans have taken the political hit for previous shutdowns, because the GOP has openly clamored for them. Maybe Democrats would take the hit if they refused to help Republicans, and maybe they wouldn’t; voters surely understand that Democrats are the party of government. But in standing up to Trump’s GOP, they’d be taking the side of most of the public. One new CNN poll found that 56 percent of voters disapprove of Trump’s handling of the economy, the lowest mark of his career; another found that 55 percent believe that the cuts to federal programs, which Democrats want to stop, will hurt the economy.

Regardless of how independents and Republicans would react, the consequences of not putting up a fight now would be catastrophic for Democratic-voter morale. During Trump’s first two months in office, party leaders have seemed flat-footed and meek, subscribing to what I’ve called a “No We Can’t” strategy. Polling shows that approval of the party and its leaders among Democrats is awful, and the idea of a liberal Tea Party—furious about the Trump administration but nearly as disgusted with Democratic leaders—suddenly seems plausible.

Few Democrats envy the chaos and disorder of the post-2010 Republican Party, but they’ve also seen GOP leaders take risks while their own party avoids them. That’s gotten Republicans control of the White House, the House, and the Senate, while Democrats have little to show for their gingerly approach. If Democratic leaders abdicate the chance to take charge now, many in the voting rank and file may not give them another chance.

The biggest risk for Democrats is that they’ll try to take a hostage by shutting down the government and discover that they are the hostage: Trump continues to do whatever he wants, and they end up folding in a few days, having obtained no concessions. That’s how most shutdowns end. As a matter of policy, however, this wouldn’t change anything. As a matter of politics, Democrats would at least get caught trying.

And if Democrats do take a hit with voters as a whole, so what? If they keep their political standing but lose all of the substantive battles, they won’t have much use for that standing. The longtime Democratic strategist James Carville, last seen misjudging the 2024 election, now says his party should just get out of Trump’s way. “It’s time for Democrats to embark on the most daring political maneuver in the history of our party: roll over and play dead,” he wrote in The New York Times last month. “Allow the Republicans to crumble beneath their own weight and make the American people miss us.”

Carville might be right that this would be an effective electoral strategy; Trump seems determined to make unpopular cuts and tie himself ever closer to the ever-more-unpopular Elon Musk, and the more voters see of Trump, the less they tend to like him. But playing dead makes sense only if one’s opponent is making garden-variety bad policy moves. This is different: Democratic leaders have said that the nation faces a historic crisis prompted by unprecedented and unconstitutional actions from the president. Did they really mean it?

Related:

The conversation Democrats need to have The Democrats’ “No We Can’t” strategy

Here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

Meet the strictest headmistress in Britain. Tesla needs a better story. Musk’s Madisonian insight—and its troubling consequences Radio Atlantic: Gaza is struggling to keep clean water flowing.

Today’s News

A federal judge ordered six federal agencies to reinstate the probationary employees they fired last month. He criticized the Trump administration’s justification for the mass layoffs, calling it a “sham.” The White House withdrew Dave Weldon’s nomination to be the director of the CDC. The Trump administration asked the Supreme Court to limit the scope of lower-court orders that largely blocked Donald Trump’s order ending birthright citizenship. If the Supreme Court rules in the administration’s favor, some restrictions on birthright citizenship could take effect.

Dispatches

Time-Travel Thursdays: Throughout The Atlantic’s history, writers have interrogated their marriages (and divorces), Serena Dai writes: “By putting themselves in control of what others hear, they try to make meaning of the life they’ve chosen.”

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Evening Read

Illustration by Jonelle Afurong / The Atlantic. Sources: Kryssia Campos / Getty; Mimi Haddon / Getty; Tooga / Getty.

Academia Needs to Stick Up for Itself

By Nicholas B. Dirks

The first time Donald Trump threatened to use the power of the presidency to punish a university, I was the target. At UC Berkeley, where I was chancellor, campus police had at the last moment canceled an appearance by Milo Yiannopoulos, the alt-right political pundit who was then a star at Breitbart News, because of a violent attack on the venue by a group of outside left-wing activists who objected to Yiannopoulos’s presence. In the end, although these protesters caused significant damage both on campus and to shops and businesses in downtown Berkeley, the police restored peace. Yiannopoulos was safely escorted back to his hotel, where he promptly criticized the university for canceling his speech. But on the morning of February 2, 2017, I awoke to a tweet reading: “If U.C. Berkeley does not allow free speech and practices violence on innocent people with a different point of view - NO FEDERAL FUNDS?”

Read the full article.

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Harold W. Clover / U.S. Army / National Archives

Take a look. These images show the final days of World War II in Germany.

Watch. “I can’t stop talking about The Traitors,” Megan Garber writes. The show (streaming on Peacock) turns reality stars against one another for TV that is part camp, part satire, and pure genius.

Play our daily crossword.

Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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