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More hostages released after Israel and Hamas agree to 2-day extension of cease-fire
Hamas released another group of hostages on Monday, not long after officials announced an agreement between the Palestinian group and Israel to extend a short-term cease-fire in the Gaza Strip for another two days.
Israel’s military and security services confirmed that the 11 hostages are now back in Israeli territory. The Red Cross had said about three hours earlier that the freed group had been turned over into its care.
Dr. Majed Al-Ansari, the spokesperson for Qatar’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, said the group includes 3 French citizens, 2 German citizens and 6 Argentinian citizens. In exchange, Al-Ansari said, Israel is releasing 33 Palestinians — 30 minors and 3 women — from Israeli prisons.
Stringer/Anadolu via Getty Images
Earlier Monday, mediating country Qatar announced the two-day extension of the temporary cease-fire, which began Friday and was initially set to last four days.
“The State of Qatar announces that, as part of the ongoing mediation, an agreement has been reached to extend the humanitarian truce for an additional two days in the Gaza Strip,” Al-Ansari said in a social media post.
John Kirby, a spokesperson for the National Security Council at the White House, confirmed the extension at a news briefing held shortly after Qatar’s announcement. Kirby said Hamas had agreed to release 20 additional hostages being held in Gaza back to Israel over the next two days, and added that they are working to extend the cease-fire further than that.
In the wake of the deadly Oct. 7 attacks on Israel by Hamas militants, and the Israeli military’s bombardment of the Gaza Strip that followed, ongoing negotiations led last week to the first pause in fighting since the war began.
Under the terms of the temporary truce deal brokered by the U.S., Qatar and Egypt, Hamas agreed to release at least 50 women and children kidnapped in Israel during the Oct. 7 rampage and held captive since then in Gaza. Israel, in turn, agreed to free about 150 Palestinian women and children detained in Israeli prisons, while also honoring a cease-fire in the interim that has allowed humanitarian aid to reach the war-torn Gaza Strip, much of which has been devastated by airstrikes.
Although the terms of the short-term deal originally called for a four-day cease-fire, with Monday being the fourth and final day, Israel had said publicly that it would be willing to extend the pause for an additional day for every 10 additional hostages released by Hamas. Militants had taken an estimated 240 hostages from Israel on Oct. 7, with some foreign nationals included in that group, according to Israeli officials.
The latest hostage release on Monday came after three earlier rounds of releases. Each of those days, Israel released 39 Palestinian women and teens who had been imprisoned in Israel, for a total of 117 so far.
On Sunday, 17 hostages were released back to Israel, including 14 Israeli citizens and three foreign nationals, according to Israeli officials. The group included Abigail Mor Edan, a 4-year-old Israeli-American girl who was the youngest American citizen being held captive.
Hamas released the second group, 17 hostages, from Gaza late on Saturday night after an hours-long delay. Thirteen of the hostages who were freed that night are Israeli, and four are Thai nationals, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office said in a statement. The group included seven Israeli children whose ages ranged from 3 to 16 years old, according to the prime minister’s office.
The first group released by Hamas on Friday included 24 hostages — 13 Israelis, 10 Thai nationals and one Filipino, officials said.
“We just completed the return of the first of our hostages: children, their mothers and additional women,” said Netanyahu on Friday. “Each of them is an entire world. But I emphasize to you, the families, and to you, citizens of Israel: we are committed to returning all the hostages. This is one of the aims of the war and we are committed to achieving all the aims of the war.”
JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon has not endorsed Donald Trump, the financial giant said Friday after the former president claimed in a social media post that the executive, America’s most prominent banking industry leader, was supporting him.
“Jamie Dimon has not endorsed anyone. He has not endorsed a candidate,” Joe Evangelisti, a spokesperson for the New York-based bank told CBS News in a statement.
The denial came after the Republican presidential nominee posted a screenshot on his Truth Social account falsely stating, “New: Jamie Dimon, the CEO of JPMorgan Chase, has endorsed Trump for president.”
Trump told NBC News he didn’t know about the post, which was still visible on his account as of 5:10 p.m. Eastern Time.
The Trump campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Seemingly coming from a verified account on X earlier in the day, the post swiftly drew attention from various pro-Trump accounts before Trump weighed in.
Before Trump won the Republican nomination for president, Dimon had expressed support for former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley during the party’s primaries.
Friday’s Truth Social post is not the first in which Trump incorrectly suggested winning support by a high-profile person. The former president in August posted AI-generated images claiming that Taylor Swift was backing him. The superstar endorsed his opponent, Kamala Harris a few weeks later.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has launched a new way for Americans to look up how high or low levels of viruses like COVID-19 and flu are in their local area for 2024.
This year’s new “community snapshot” is the CDC’s latest attempt to repackage its data in one place for Americans deciding when to take extra precautions recommended in its guidelines, like masking or testing, going into the fall and winter.
It centers around a sweeping new weekly metric called “acute respiratory illness.” The metric’s debut fulfills a goal laid out by agency officials months ago, aiming to measure the risk of COVID-19 alongside other germs that spread through the air on a single scale from “minimal” to “very high.”
“The biggest thing we’re trying to do here is not just to have a dashboard. It’s not just putting a bunch of information in front of people and kind of expecting them to navigate all of that,” the CDC’s Captain Matthew Ritchey told CBS News.
Ritchey, who co-leads the team that coordinates data fed into the snapshots, said the CDC gathers experts from across the agency every Thursday to walk through the week’s data coming from hospitals and emergency rooms, wastewater sampling and testing laboratories.
“All those groups come together, talking through their different data systems and their expertise to say, ‘this is what’s catching my eye.’ And then that’s what we want to tee up for the public,” he said.
Ritchey cited early signs of respiratory syncytial virus, or RSV, starting to increase this season as expected in Florida, which is called out at the top of this week’s report.
Behind the CDC’s new “respiratory illness” metric
Based on emergency room data, the “acute respiratory illness” metric, grades overall infections in each state or county from “minimal” to “very high.”
That is defined broadly to capture infections from COVID-19 and influenza, as well as a range of other diseases that spread through the air like whooping cough or pneumonia.
A previous definition the agency had relied on called “influenza-like illness” had been too narrow, Ritchey said, with requirements like fever which excluded many patients.
A separate set of standalone levels is still being calculated each week for COVID-19, influenza and RSV.
The formula behind those levels is based on historical peaks and valleys in emergency room trends, which were analyzed from each state.
“We’ve looked over the last couple of years and understand the low points of the year, based on our lab testing, and at that point we say, that’s the baseline or ‘minimal’ category,” said Ritchey.
How to see what COVID variants are dominant
Not all of the CDC’s data made the cutoff to be included on the first layer of the agency’s new snapshot.
For example, while the front page for the general public does mention current SARS-CoV-2 variants like XEC, details about its prevalence remain on a separate webpage deeper into the CDC’s website.
“That whole jumble of lots of acronyms or letters and things like that just don’t overly resonate with them,” he said.
For flu, the CDC is still publishing more detailed weekly updates designed for experts, through the agency’s “FluView” reports.
Those include a weekly breakdown of the “type” – influenza A or B – and “subtype” – like H3N2 or H1N1 – that is being reported to the agency from testing laboratories.
Health authorities closely watch trends in flu subtyping as well, since they can help explain changes in the severity of the virus as well as vaccine effectiveness.
Future changes to come
The snapshot remains a work in progress as the CDC gathers feedback from the public as well as local health departments.
“We have a continuum of users, from the public health practitioner to my parents, providing feedback on how they’re using it. More often, the feedback we get is, ‘hey, I use this to help inform how I work, or talk with my elderly parents,'” he said.
One big change coming later this season is the resumption of nationwide hospitalization data, after a pandemic-era requirement for hospitals to report the figures to the federal government lapsed.
A new rule by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services to start collecting the data again for COVID-19, influenza and RSV is due to take effect in November.
“As that data starts to come in again and gets to a robust enough level, the plan is that it would be incorporated on the site as well,” he said.
Another long term goal is to add information specific to other respiratory illness culprits beyond COVID-19, influenza and RSV.
“We want to be able to talk about maybe some of the other things that are not the big three as well, like mycoplasma and some of those other things too, that we know peak during certain parts of the season,” he said.
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