Unrest over the Israel Hamas conflict is mounting here at home.

Today, pro-Palestine supporters made their way to the statehouse in Trenton carrying signs, some showing the faces of civilian Palestinian children who've been killed in the war since it began more than a month ago.

And lobbying state lawmakers for more local support to New Jersey's Muslim community.

This weekend, the Palestinian-American community center held a press conference highlighting the plight of health care workers in Gaza who are operating under deadly conditions.

As reports show another deadly Israeli airstrike hit a northern Gaza hospital where many were sheltering.

The Hamas run health ministry inside regardless, has more than 13,000 Palestinians have been killed.

Just under half are children.

It's all the response to a surprise attack by Hamas on October 7th in which 1300 Israelis were killed.

Today, it appears Israel and Hamas are inching closer to a deal that will release some of the 240 hostage as captured by the militant group that day.

As Israeli families wait in agony to know whether their loved ones are alive, Haggai Matar is a board member of the Union of Journalists in Israel and the executive director of 972 magazine based in Tel Aviv.

He's been writing about and covering the war, and he joins me now.

Haggai Matar .

Welcome back to the show and I really appreciate you taking some time to talk.

Let me ask you first about this deal where all learning about potentially for a temporary cease fire in order to allow at least some of the hostages in Gaza to be released.

What can you tell me about what your outlet is reporting and what we know?

So, so far, we don't know much that is verified.

There's a lot of rumor going on intensively over the past few days.

It looks like something is developing towards a deal that will include a cease fire and the release of somewhere between 50 and 80 hostages, probably some women and their children and all the children that are held there.

That is quite likely with or without the release of some Palestinian prisoners who are women and children.

But still, the noise around this deal is very intense.

We have accusations coming from both sides of the other side is uninterested.

And until we actually see people coming out, it's very hard to to be very sure of anything.

Is there any, I guess, hope attached to it?

This has obviously been a very desperate time for everyone.

Does this at least afford a sense that there could be a way out?

Well, I think the way that Israel has been portraying this is that even if there is a deal that would include some sort of cease fire, it is temporary.

It's just to get those people out and then the fighting will continue.

We keep hearing from the entire both military and political leadership in Israel that this military campaign, as far as they're concerned, is going to go on for at least months ahead.

And and I'm not certain that's the case, but that's where they're aiming.

And I think even we will see three or five days of cease fire.

There will be more fighting after that.

Yeah, since we last spoke, which was just a couple of days after the Hamas attack, October 7th, at least in the West, there has been a rise of resistance against the U.S. policies backing Israel in the war in an effort to elevate Palestinian lives.

And I'm curious if any of that resistance is also on the ground in Israel or if those folks are more isolated in those beliefs.

I think in Israel, we have, you know, two populations of the citizens.

You have Palestinians.

So the vast majority of whom are opposed to the war, but are also being very brutally oppressed by the Israeli police.

People are being arrested not only for going on a silent vigil, but even for publishing.

You know, I cry for the people of Gaza or, you know, stop the war now, defend all civilians, things like that can get people arrested and spend quite a considerable number of days in jail.

So there's this atmosphere of terror amongst Palestinians, it seems, because of the way the police has been treating them, Jewish citizens as well.

Some have been detained, but not as many.

And the vast majority of citizens still very much support this war.

Even people who are kind of traditionally more on the left have been supporting this, saying we will eventually need a peaceful solution, but we need to eliminate Hamas first.

And whatever the army is doing right now is justified.

The number of Jewish Israelis who are actively opposed to the war.

And we saw the first actual demonstration of a few hundred people just this last Saturday is very, very small.

I'm wondering about you as a journalist, how difficult it's been to report on the conflict, both personally, but also to get the information you need to verify it and perhaps even backlash.

I think it's really important for me to say, as someone who leads a media outlet that is shared by both Israelis and Palestinians, we have people reporting in Gaza.

The most difficult thing is our concern for the people there.

We have had one previous contributor that wrote one piece for us in the past that was killed together with his entire family.

Our current contributors we're calling every morning just to see that they're alive.

Some of them we've lost touch with for a few days now and we're trying to get a hold of them.

They might have just run out of battery because there's no electricity.

But we don't know what happened to them.

So everything else in terms of our journalism, fact checking, reporting, personal fears is really marginal compared to the concern to Gaza journalists, dozens of whom have been killed, some of them with their entire families so far.

Haggai Matar's a Israeli journalist based in Tel Aviv.

Haggai, thank you for joining me.

Thanks for having me.