Good morning. Benjamin Netanyahu is in D.C. and Donald Trump is keen for a Gaza peace deal – more on that below, along with the latest on the Texas floods and a new pipeline partnership. But first:

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The odds seemed decent yesterday that Donald Trump would take to Truth Social – where he prefers to conduct the bulk of his diplomacy – and declare a ceasefire in the 21-month war between Israel and Hamas. After all, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was already at the White House for dinner that evening, and the pair were riding high from last month’s bombing of Iran’s nuclear sites. Negotiations with Israeli and Hamas officials had begun in Qatar over the weekend. Trump said on Sunday, before golfing in New Jersey, that an end to the fighting was close.

It’s possible that Trump pushed Netanyahu for a deal over the dinner table, but there’s been no announcement yet. Still, new details on a potential ceasefire in Gaza have emerged, as Qatari and Egyptian mediators – to be joined in Doha this week by Trump’s Middle East envoy, Steve Witkoff – work furiously to hammer out the final sticking points in the talks. The current proposal, which would usher in a 60-day truce, doesn’t say much about the prospect for long-term peace. Here’s what it says instead.

Hostage releases

Before leaving for his meeting in D.C., Netanyahu told reporters at Ben Gurion Airport that 50 Israeli hostages remain in Gaza, 20 of them alive. Under the proposed agreement, Hamas would release 10 living hostages and the bodies of 18 others in exchange for hundreds of Palestinian prisoners. The hostage release would be staggered across the 60-day ceasefire and, crucially, would not involve the public handover ceremonies that Hamas staged during an earlier truce, where Israeli hostages were forced at gunpoint to thank their captors. That ceasefire fell apart in March before it could move to its second stage.

Aid distribution

The current proposal says that humanitarian aid would immediately flow into Gaza. It’s not clear, though, exactly how it would be delivered or what would happen to the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, which replaced most relief operations in the territory at the end of May. Since then, Israeli forces have routinely opened fire on people seeking food outside GHF sites; more than 500 Palestinians were killed in a month.

During the last ceasefire, the UN’s World Food Program maintained roughly 400 aid stations throughout Gaza. By contrast, the GHF currently operates just four compounds, all in the south, run by private U.S. security contractors and overseen by the Israeli military. The U.S. and Israel want UN agencies to work through the GHF to deliver much-needed aid in Gaza, where the entire population of 2.3 million is at risk of famine. The UN has refused. “Any operation that channels desperate civilians into militarized zones is inherently unsafe,” Secretary-General António Guterres said. “It is killing people.”

A permanent truce?

This is where any deal gets especially tricky. Hamas has refused to hand over the last hostages until Israel removes its troops from Gaza and ends the war. Israel has refused to end the war until Hamas disarms fully, exiles its leadership and releases the captives. The framework on the table doesn’t reconcile these competing goals. Instead, it asserts that the U.S., Egypt and Qatar will work to ensure that serious negotiations for a permanent ceasefire take place over the 60 days. During that time, according to Politico, the proposal says that Trump himself will personally “guarantee Israel’s adherence” to a halt in fighting.

As for who will govern Gaza after the war? The proposal is mum on that question, too. Israel maintains that the West Bank-based Palestinian Authority can have no role in administering the territory. Egypt, Jordan and France released a statement in April declaring that postwar governance must be the sole responsibility of the Palestinian Authority. Israel has flat-out rejected the idea of a two-state solution. Pretty much every other country flat-out rejected Trump’s fleeting proposal to take over Gaza and turn it into the “Riviera of the Middle East.”

“Trump really seems to want a deal. He wants to come to the meeting with Netanyahu with the image of a peacemaker,” Ghaith al-Omari, a former official with the Palestinian Authority, told The Globe yesterday. “What we haven’t heard is any clear American vision on what the day after the war looks like.”

Crews picked through mountains of debris and waded into swollen rivers yesterday as the death toll in the Texas floods passed 100, with dozens still missing. Read more here from The Globe’s Patrick White, who’s on the ground in Kerr County.