Up First from NPR - Gaza Ceasefire Deal Reached, Next Steps For TikTok, Anger Over Private Firefighters

Episode Date: January 17, 2025

Negotiators have reached a deal for a ceasefire and hostage release in Gaza, according to the office of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. A law banning TikTok starts Sunday, but the Supreme Court is poised to rule on whether it is legal or not, and if it will be delayed. Plus, the wildfires in Los Angeles surfaced an industry that is attracting scorn: private firefighting.For more comprehensive analysis of the most important news of the day, plus a little fun? Subscribe to the Up First newsletter.Today's episode of Up First was edited by Kara Platoni, Jerome Socolovsky, Ally Schweitzer and Lisa Thomson. It was produced by Ziad Buchh, Nia Dumas, Iman Ma'ani and Lilly Quiroz. We get engineering support from Neisha Heinis and our technical director is Stacey Abbott.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Israel's security cabinet has voted to approve a ceasefire deal with Hamas. Now the long awaited deal still isn't final, but if passed by the full cabinet, it could go into effect as early as Sunday, sending 33 hostages back home and bringing an end to 15 months of war in Gaza. I'm Michelle Martin with Leila Fadl and this is Up First from NPR News. The Supreme Court has upheld a ban on TikTok effective in the U.S. on Sunday under a law signed by President Biden. A bipartisan majority in Congress passed a bill last year that said the Chinese parent

company ByteDance had to sell the popular video sharing app or shut it down in the U.S. President-elect Donald Trump had once agreed with the ban but changed his mind and now says he wants to save it. So what's next? And the Los Angeles wildfires brought attention to a luxury enjoyed by some homeowners in fire prone areas. Private firefighters. Their existence is making some people very angry. So what do they actually do and why are more insurance companies hiring them? Stay with us, we've got the news you need to start your day. This message comes from Wyse, the app for doing things in other currencies. Sending

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Tested from NPR's Embedded podcast and CBC takes you inside that struggle. Listen to Tested, the series that was named one of the 10 best podcasts of 2024 by Apple, Vulture and The New York Times. It's season 20 of NPR's Embedded podcast. Times. It's season 20 of NPR's embedded podcast. Israel's security cabinet has now voted to approve a ceasefire deal to halt the fighting in Gaza. The decision came two days after mediators Qatar and the United States said an agreement had been reached that both Israel and Hamas representatives agreed to. The full Israeli cabinet will meet later today to consider the deal. And if it is approved, it would halt more than 15 months of fighting in Gaza.

Some ministers and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's cabinet renewed their calls to continue the war in Gaza. The stops and starts of negotiations as people like 21-year-old Shema Ahmed in Gaza afraid to hope just in case the deal falls through. We really want it to be over. We're desperate to hear that it's finally and actually over so that we can continue moving on with our life. With me now is NPR's Kat Lonsdorf in Tel Aviv to walk us through the latest. Hi Kat. Hey there.

Okay, so it's past the Israeli Security Cabinet. Does this now make it a done deal? Not quite. So we're waiting on a vote later today by the larger Israeli government, but it is expected to pass there with a majority of the votes. It is possible that it could still be challenged in Israel's Supreme Court. It's expected to make it through that too though. So there are a few more steps, but it does seem likely that a ceasefire could start as early as Sunday. Okay and what's been the hold up so far in Israel? Although at this point it

seems like those hurdles are over. Yeah it's been a tense time here since this was announced by mediators back on Wednesday night. It was announced by Egypt, Qatar, and the U.S. and even Hamas back then but Israel did not confirm it. Netanyahu's office put out a statement saying that Hamas had come back with last-minute changes to the deal. That still had to be worked out, and Hamas denied that. So it was a little unclear what the holdup was exactly. And meanwhile, there has been a disagreement within Israel's security cabinet. Two far-right members were very, very against this deal.

Both of them threatened to leave Netanyahu's government if the deal did go through, and that would collapse his coalition and throw Israel's government into a tailspin. You know, it seems like that has been a bit smoothed out, although both of those ministers did vote against the deal in the security cabinet vote this morning. Now, you said the ceasefire should start Sunday,

as expected. What will those first hours, that first day look like and what happens after that? We know several Israeli hostages will be released that first day in exchange for several Palestinian detainees. We also know that the fighting will stop in Gaza and Israeli troops will start to withdraw. The plan is for it to stop for at least six weeks. Over that time, 33 of the remaining 98 hostages should be released and around a thousand Palestinian detainees are also expected to be released. There's also supposed to be a significant increase

in the flow of much needed humanitarian aid to Gaza. And also in that time, negotiations for the next phase of this deal will also take place in the hopes of, you know, continuing the ceasefire with more releases and more withdrawal of Israeli troops. Okay, so not an end to the war, but a pause for now. Yeah. But right now there isn't a ceasefire.

What's happening in Gaza? Yeah, the fighting is very much still ongoing. Israel says it carried out around 50 airstrikes in the past day. It says it killed a Hamas fighter who participated in the 2023 attacks on southern Israel that started this war. Meanwhile, more than 100 Palestinians have been killed in the time since this deal was announced on Wednesday night, many of them children, according to civil defense in Gaza. So, you know, the cost, the human cost of keeping this war going is

still very, very high. Our producer in Gaza, Anas Baba, says that people there are feeling anxious. They're worried that the fighting is going to get worse before it gets better. That's NPR's Kat Lonsdorf in Tel Aviv. Thank you, Kat. Thank you. The Supreme Court has upheld a ban on the popular short video app TikTok that takes effect in just two days on Sunday. That's unless the app sells its U.S. operations away from a Chinese company. The court unanimously affirmed a lower court ruling holding that the national security concerns about the app are the number one concern.

It's unclear what could come next under President-elect Donald Trump, who once agreed with the ban, but now has vowed to save it. And here's Bobbi Allen joins me now to discuss. Hey, Bobbi. Hey, Leila. Okay, so what did the court just decide exactly? or just decide exactly? The court decided that the national security concerns that Congress established about TikTok are indeed the paramount concern here. And I want to quote sort of the crux of the matter here,

which was an opinion. It was unsigned by the court. And they say, quote, there is no doubt that for the more than 170 million Americans, TikTok offers a distinct and expansive outlet for expression, means of engagement, and source of community. But Congress has determined that divestiture is necessary to address its well-supported national security concerns. So basically what this decision is saying

is Congress decided that TikTok is a threat. They said, the users said that they have First Amendment concerns, but the Supreme Court here is deferring to the judgment of Congress. Now the law, as we mentioned, it would go into effect on Sunday. So what exactly would happen? There's so much uncertainty right now. As you said, in two days, this law takes effect, which means Apple and Google will have to yank TikTok out of app stores and all of TikTok's web support will have to sever ties with the app, or face really, really stiff penalties. We're talking $5,000 per user, and this law applies, the statute of limitations on it is for five years. So the companies that are backing up TikTok,

that keep TikTok online, are going to have to act. That said, you know, Biden signed this law, but, you know, he came out with a statement today saying that TikTok should remain available to Americans. So many are trying to make sense of that. On top of that, President-elect Donald Trump says he wants to save the app. So there's just a lot going on here politically. Okay. So come Sunday, if an American wants to open their TikTok app. Can they? We don't know. TikTok has said that it is possible they will go dark on the 19th. TikTok's lawyers said that to the court last Friday and I was there and heard it. And it was a pretty stunning revelation. The more reporting I did on this, Laila, the more I understood it. And it's possible that when 170 million Americans open up their app on Sunday, they

get a dialog box that pops up and says, this service is no longer available in your region. But it might not. We just don't know exactly how the company is going to respond. But I do know that that is among the many options. OK, now President-elect Trump, has he said anything about the decision? I haven't seen any statement yet from President-elect Trump has he said anything about the decision? I haven't seen any statement yet from President-elect Trump, but the past several months He has said he will figure out a way to keep tick-tock alive

Remember, he started the tick-tock ban movement during his first term Then he flip-flopped and said, you know Tick-tock was great in terms of getting the youth vote out. And now he is determined to figure out a way to keep it around in America that could look like, you know, pushing it off for 90 days, which the law allows, or trying to broker some kind of fire sale to bring in some American companies, American investors, to try to get China to offload the app and have it under new ownership. But that remains to be seen. And the big question now, Leila, is what happens Sunday? Will it be there? Will it not? We just

don't know. But there is just a lot of fear among TikTokers and a lot of dread on the app. That's NPR's Bobby Allen. Thank you, Bobby. Thanks, Leila. A little known industry has come into the spotlight. Private firefighting. It's just what it sounds like. Firefighters who work for private clients, not the public. The idea has drawn a lot of scorn online and it's raising ethics questions. But we wanted to know more about how private firefighting

actually works. Here to tell us more about this is NPR's Laurel Wamsley. Hi Laurel. Hey Leila. So Laurel, the only time I'd ever heard about private firefighters, if you remember a wildfire a few years ago in the Los Angeles area where Kim Kardashian and her husband at the time, Kanye West,

hired private firefighters to save their homes. and it sounded like something only for the most wealthy. Right so these are back in the news here in Los Angeles and a lot of the attention is stemming from this single tweet that's now been deleted. Last week a resident of the wealthy Pacific Palisades area posted on X asking if anyone had access to private firefighters who could protect his home as his neighbors homes were burning. He said he would quote, pay any amount. And of course, there was a lot of blowback to that idea. It struck a lot of folks as unfair and just crummy. And so there have been media reports of billionaires hiring private firefighters to protect their

homes and businesses. But of course, many wealthy people did lose their homes in these fires. I found that a much bigger part of this story is actually not the individuals hiring extra fire protection, but that insurers are hiring them as part of people's homeowners policies. Oh, okay, that's something I didn't know. Insurance companies were doing this? What exactly do these services do? Yeah, so I spoke with David Torgerson.

He's executive chairman of Wildfire Defense Companies, and they work on behalf of nearly three dozen insurers, and they're regulated under California law. So when there's a wildfire endangering homes insured by these companies, his crews arrive loaded with water but most of what they provide is labor. We clean, we sweep, we clear gutters, we take away the places where the embers can ignite on the property or take away the access that the embers have to get in the buildings. Embers can get into a house through the dryer vent, so his crews will tape those shut. They'll also come back after the fire passes to make sure there isn't a bush or a fence that's burning that could still ignite the house.

So for the insurance companies, they are paying for these firefighters, but is this about limiting their losses by the much larger expense of properties burning down in the first place? It's about prevention rather than having to pay for replacing all those lost homes. So more and more insurers are including this as a standard part of their homeowners policies in wildfire prone states. How does this work? Does a truck full of trained firefighters and water just show up to protect homes that have these specific insurers and then just

ignore everybody who doesn't have those insurers? Well it's obviously sort of hard to know exactly what happens in the field. When I asked a spokesperson at the insurer USAA that question, she said the providers that they work with don't just drive on by a house that's on fire, that they're staffed with a lot of retired fire chiefs and it's just embedded in them to help the community. But still, private companies obviously might have different priorities than firefighters who work for the public. Okay, so stepping back, does this just mean that rich people or people with the right coverage get a separate lane from the rest of people? Yeah, I mean, I asked an ethics expert about this and he said there are a whole host of ethical questions here.

For instance, which firefighters get access to limited water supplies? It can be really divisive in society when it feels like even in a crisis, the rich and powerful get insulated from what's happening. And I asked Torgerson about this, who runs that company that works for the insurers, and he said, well, in a crisis, we need all the help we can get and it's better to have more structures survive. They're helping to keep insurance in the marketplace, he says, which has been a huge problem in California in recent years. So these are big questions and there are no easy answers. I'm Piaz Laura Wamsley. Thank you, Laura.

You're welcome. And that's A First for Friday, January 17th. I'm Leila Faldon. And I'm Michelle Martin. And just a reminder, Up First airs on weekends too. Ayusha Rasco and Scott Simon will have the news. Look for it wherever you get your podcasts. Today's episode of Up First was edited by Kara Platoni, Jerome Sokolowski, Ali Schweitzer, and Lisa Thompson. It was produced by Ziad Bach, Nia Dumas, Iman Maani, and Lily Kyros. We get engineering support from Niche Highness, and our technical director is Stacey Abbott. Our executive producer is Kelly Dickens. Join us again on Monday.

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