James' World 2

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“The U.S. now has to face up to the fact it has an adversary which can threaten substantial parts of the U.S. economy,” said Henry Farrell, a political scientist at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. The United States and China are now very clearly “in a much more delicate stage of mutual interdependence,” he added.

“China has really begun to figure out how to take a leaf from the U.S. playbook and, in a certain sense, play that game better than the U.S. is currently playing it,” Mr. Farrell said.

China’s move has rekindled tensions between the world’s two largest economies, with Mr. Trump threatening to increase already substantial tariffs on Chinese imports by imposing an additional 100 percent tax on Nov. 1 unless Beijing backs down from its new restrictions.

The type of supply chain restriction that China is embarking on first came into play in 2020. Washington dusted off an obscure provision known as the foreign direct product rule to target the Chinese tech giant Huawei, which the U.S. government considered a national security threat. But instead of restricting American technology exports just to Huawei, the United States said any company anywhere in the world could not ship a product to Huawei if it contained U.S. parts or was made with U.S. equipment or software.

Because of the United States’ key role in the global chipmaking industry, the rules basically encompassed all advanced technology. It was a broad exertion of U.S. economic power that became the basis of a series of global tech rules during the Biden administration. Although foreign governments chafed at being told what to do, many cooperated for fear of being cut off from U.S. technology.

The question now is: Will the Chinese restrictions persuade the Trump administration to walk back its tariffs or longstanding technology restrictions, or will China’s government fold under pressure first?

The administration seemed caught off guard by China’s restrictions, which could cripple American industries. Mr. Trump threatened on Friday to cancel a planned meeting with the Chinese leader, Xi Jinping, as well as adding a 100 percent tariff. After stock markets plunged, the president posted on social media on Sunday, “Don’t worry about China, it will all be fine!”

On Tuesday, Mr. Trump renewed his barbs, telling a crowd of reporters and the president of Argentina that Mr. Xi “gets testy because China likes to take advantage of people and they can’t take advantage of us.” That afternoon, Mr. Trump wrote on social media that the United States was considering terminating cooking oil imports from China, as well as potentially other business.

On Wednesday morning, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Jamieson Greer, the U.S. trade representative, described the Chinese licensing system as a global power grab and said the United States stood ready to impose its tariffs if China moved forward.

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President Trump has threatened to cancel a meeting with China’s top leader, Xi Jinping, who spoke at the Global Leaders’ Meeting on Women in Beijing on Monday.Credit…Pool photo by Ken Ishii

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In 2006, immunologist and 2025 Nobel prize winner Shimon Sakaguchi co-wrote an article in Scientific American that now feels prophetic. In the story, entitled “Peacekeepers of the Immune System,” Sakaguchi traced a time line of important studies that led to his discovery of an elusive type of immune cell he called regulatory T cells.

In the 1980s, the field had largely dismissed the existence of such a class of cells, but Sakaguchi and other scientists proved that regulatory T cells, or Tregs, are the integral “peacekeepers” that prevent the immune system from overreacting and harming the body itself. That process, known as peripheral immune tolerance, stops the body’s primary defense mechanism from entering self-destruct mode, called autoimmunity.

The experiments Sakaguchi cataloged in Scientific American nearly 20 years ago were recognized last week at the 2025 Nobel award ceremony in Stockholm, where he and immunologists Mary E. Brunkow and Fred Ramsdell shared the prize in physiology or medicine for their discoveries.

“I didn’t expect it, and of course, I was very much pleased,” Sakaguchi says. “I’m happy to have this honor. But at the same time, I really appreciate the community of scientists who have worked together. The progress of this field is really due to the collective effort of many scientists and immunologists.”

In an exclusive interview, Scientific American caught up with Sakaguchi on October 7 EDT, the day after the award announcement. He discussed the crucial findings that led to the discovery of regulatory T cells and clinical trials that harness these cells to potentially treat chronic infections, cancer, and autoimmune diseases.

What was your journey into looking for cells that suppressed the immune system? What drew you to them?

I was very much interested in autoimmune diseases because our immune system normally defends our cells from invading microbes—viruses and bacteria—but sometimes it’s aggressive and destroys our body cells and causes autoimmune diseases such as rheumatoid arthritis and type 1 diabetes. So the immune system has two aspects: good and bad. What’s the mechanism behind this? If we can understand that mechanism, we may be able to treat autoimmune diseases, or the opposite: make the immune system attack abnormal cells, such as cancer cells, arising in our body.

That was my interest when I was a student in medical school, and then I became a researcher to tackle this conundrum. At that time [in the 1980s], the only available approach to study autoimmunity was the mouse model. I happened to find that newborn mice, if you remove the thymus [an organ in the chest that produces various types of T cells], they spontaneously develop autoimmunelike diseases. And then what was interesting was: if you inoculate the thymus-free mice with normal T cells from nonaffected adult mice, you can prevent disease development—meaning that in the normal collection of T cells in the thymus, there must be some cells that can prevent or suppress disease development. That was the start of my research career.

What convinced you that regulatory T cells existed when others abandoned the theory?

I was convinced that autoimmune diseases, similar to [how they can arise] in humans, can be produced in healthy animals by just manipulating the immune system, removing certain T cells. That was always a very solid phenomenon for me. If other hypotheses or other ideas could explain what we saw, I would follow that concept or idea. I always compared what I believed and what [other theories] showed—which one had better explanatory powers. Our results were not so bad—and were even better—so that was the reason that I continued my research on regulatory T cells. It is really a key issue in modern immunology: How can we realize or understand why the immune system does not react with ourselves?

In 2006, you wrote an article for Scientific American entitled “Peacekeepers of the Immune System.” How did you come up with the name “peacekeepers” for the cells?

That was coined by my colleague and co-author of that article, Zoltan Fehervari—he’s now an editor of Nature. At that time, we talked about how we can name them and make them more relatable. And then he came up with that idea: “peacekeeper.” It was a really nice name because, later on, we gradually realized that regulatory T cells not only are immunosuppressive but also have various other functions, such as promoting tissue repair. So they are peacekeepers for many things.

You essentially documented in the article how pivotal this work was nearly two decades ago. Did you think back then that your research would be recognized for a Nobel Prize?

Actually, I didn’t. I really hoped that we could have a better understanding of immunological self-tolerance. It’s a long-standing, important question in immunology. Even the 1960 Nobel awards were awarded to Peter Medawar and Frank Macfarlane Burnet, who showed that immune tolerance is acquired, not innate. Well, that’s really interesting, but how does it happen? There have been several theories, including clonal deletion: deleting the dangerous self-reactive clones [of T cells]. They are eliminated when they are immature and being produced in the immune system. But that couldn’t explain how usual autoimmune diseases happen—for example, type 1 diabetes or rheumatoid arthritis. So it is really a key issue in modern immunology: How can we realize or understand why the immune system does not react with ourselves?

Are there any therapies or applications of your work that are close to making it to the clinic?

What is fascinating about regulatory T cells is that they are specialized for immune suppression, and so this means that if you strengthen their functions or increase their numbers, it could be a good way to treat autoimmunity or allergies, or various diseases. On the other hand, if you reduce the number of these cells or make their function weaker, then the immune response can be enhanced. So it could be good for cancer immunity. We are pursuing both directions, our team and many others. There are many, many trials underway—at the Nobel announcement, the chairperson told us that more than 200 clinical trials are ongoing now.

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Hmmmm… So this is the land of the free!

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As the agents left, they released tear gas, apparently without warning, sending people coughing and running for cover. Among those affected by the gas were 13 Chicago Police Department officers, the police department said, and at least one officer was seen rinsing his eyes out with water from a neighbor’s garden hose.

A spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security said that the federal agents were conducting an immigration enforcement operation when two people tried to flee and hit the agents’ vehicle.

“This incident is not isolated and reflects a growing and dangerous trend of illegal aliens violently resisting arrest and agitators and criminals ramming cars into our law enforcement officers,” the D.H.S. said in a statement. The statement said that federal agents used “crowd control measures” after a group of people gathered and turned hostile.

It was one of many turbulent episodes to erupt in Chicago in recent days. Federal agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Border Patrol have roamed the city and suburbs, making arrests, often pulling up to people walking along sidewalks, stopping them, and questioning them.

The agents repeatedly have been observed releasing smoke bombs, tear gas, and pepper balls to disperse residents who gather or capture videos on cellphones, including when the agents were making arrests in densely populated neighborhoods. Chicago police officers, who have been called to the scenes of some clashes, have been exposed to tear gas from federal agents twice in the last two weeks.

As the intensity of the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown has risen, residents of Chicago are increasingly pushing back with fury.

In the last several weeks, Chicagoans have formed volunteer groups to monitor their neighborhoods for federal immigration agents, posting alerts on Facebook and in Signal group chats when agents are seen.

If agents are spotted on the street, motorists lean on their horns as a warning and sometimes give chase. Around the city last weekend, pairs of volunteers were seen with orange whistles around their necks, blowing the whistles at the first sight of immigration agents.

One Chicago resident, Chris Molitor, stationed himself on a street corner on the North Side on Tuesday, holding a sign denouncing President Trump and wearing a shirt critical of ICE.

“We’re seeing videos of people being abused,” said Mr. Molitor, 64, who works in hospitality, nodding in the direction of a local taqueria whose owners were questioned by ICE. “There’s got to be a pushback of some kind.”

Smoke filled the air after federal agents used tear gas during a clash with community members on the far South Side.

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The idea that a single-celled bacterium can defend itself against viruses in a similar way as the 1.8-trillion-cell human immune system is still “mind-blowing” for molecular biologist Joshua Modell of Johns Hopkins University.

Scientists discovered 20 years ago that bacteria use an adaptive defense system called CRISPR that allows microbes to recognize and destroy viral invaders on repeat encounters. In a recent study published in Cell Host & Microbe, Modell and his team have deepened our understanding of how bacteria use this system to “vaccinate” themselves against phages, the viruses that try to kill them. The findings could help the development of treatments to fight antimicrobial resistance, which contributes to millions of deaths annually.

The CRISPR system allows bacteria to edit their own genome. After being exposed to a virus, bacteria can use a special enzyme to insert small pieces of the virus’s DNA, called spacers, into their genome, which helps them recognize and fight off the virus next time. Scientists now use this enzyme as a pair of “genetic scissors” to tweak DNA in everything from lab experiments to gene therapies, but researchers still knew little about how this process plays out in bacteria. “We called it the CRISPR mystery because we didn’t really understand what was happening inside,” Modell says.

To understand how bacteria manage to grab the DNA of invading viruses, the researchers ran controlled lab experiments using Streptococcus pyogenes bacteria and the phages that infect it. During the infectious phase, most phages rupture the cell immediately, a process known as lysis. On rare occasions, they can instead hide inside the bacterial DNA and become dormant, a state called lysogeny. This state is notoriously difficult to study.

In the lab, Modell’s team infected bacteria with phages that could go dormant as well as genetically engineered phages locked in an active state. The researchers then collected surviving cells and checked their genetic code to see if they had added new spacers taken from the viruses’ DNA.

They found that bacteria only added spacers from phages that could go dormant. During this lull, Modell explains, the bacteria have time to grab tiny pieces of viral DNA and store them in their genome. “The CRISPR system makes memories against an inactivated form of the virus just like a vaccine,” Modell says. To confirm their results, Modell and his team exposed spacer-carrying bacteria to the same phages again to observe whether the new genetic memories protected them from infection. The researchers observed that the bacterium can recognize the phages using those stored fragments and fight them off.

The findings are “pretty remarkable,” says molecular biologist Stan Brouns of Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands, who was not involved in the study. Understanding the interactions between phages and bacteria is key to improving phage therapies, an approach where scientists use viruses to treat infections caused by bacteria that have developed resistance to antibiotics.

This new understanding could also help researchers design phages that more types of infection-causing bacteria will be susceptible to, says North Carolina State University molecular biologist Rodolphe Barrangou, who co-founded Locus Biosciences, a biotech company that develops antibacterial products, and who also was not involved in the study. Various bacteria can have any of more than 150 antiphage defense mechanisms that treatments have to dodge; understanding how this one works is “going to inspire people who work on [bacteria] to think about phage therapies on a broader range of infectious diseases.”

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Thomas Fuchs

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Back in the 1920s, Charles Mitchell — the swaggering head of National City Bank, the forerunner to Citigroup — had a ritual. He would take his bond salesmen to lunch at the Bankers Club, perched atop the Equitable Building at 120 Broadway, and point to the city below, stretched out in miniature. “There are six million people with incomes that aggregate thousands of millions of dollars,” he’d say. “They are just waiting for someone to come to tell them what to do with their savings. Take a good look, eat a good lunch, and then go down and tell them.”

For Mitchell, finance and the new instruments of wealth — stocks, margin loans, investment trusts, and even exotic foreign bonds — were not to be hidden away but promoted like any other product. “It has always seemed to me that there is, and always has been, too much mystery connected with banking,” he liked to say.

He wasn’t alone in preaching the gospel of access. John Raskob — a top executive at General Motors, a born promoter and the man who built the Empire State Building — famously declared, “Everybody ought to be rich!” He explained: “I didn’t see why the working men and women of our country should not be let in on the tremendous profits being made in America today.” Raskob set out to create one of the first mutual funds, explicitly designed to give “the little fellows” a chance to join the boom.

Nearly a century later, we are in the grip of a sweeping new age of financialization and innovation — the boldest transformation in money and investing since the 1920s — that is also driven by the idea of expanding access to markets. Private equity, venture capital, and private credit, once the preserve of institutions and wealthy individuals, are now about to be repackaged for the masses, even woven into 401(k) retirement plans. Crypto tokens are being sold as a way to buy slices of private firms like SpaceX and OpenAI, in the gray zone of securities law.

It all comes amid a new stock boom, fueled by a mania for A.I., and with a new administration in Washington that is determined to loosen rules — creating a permissive spirit similar to the one that passed for innovation in the 1920s. The Trump administration is working on rolling back key provisions of the Dodd-Frank Act, easing capital requirements for midsize banks, and sidelining the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau — an agency born after 2008 to police predatory lending. Congress, for its part, has advanced measures like the Genius Act and, more recently, the so-called Financial Innovation and Technology for the 21st Century Act — billed as modernization and, in practice, opening the gates for crypto and other speculative products.

And just as in Mitchell’s day, they have their boosters. “Only the biggest companies can go public, which limits opportunities for the little guy,” Vlad Tenev of Robinhood has said, insisting that “the next frontier is making sure these opportunities are open to retail investors.” Marc Rowan of Apollo is equally blunt about retirement savings, arguing that asset managers have “leveraged the future of retirement to four stocks,” which will prove to be “an irresponsible thing for us to have done.”

What has shifted are the buzzwords and the gloss; what has not is the promise — that the American dream itself could be remade into a get-rich fantasy, a promise first popularized in the 1920s. Mitchell’s belief that stocks and bonds were for everyone and should be sold “over the counter, just the same way a clerk sells a necktie,” helped elevate him alongside Babe Ruth and Charles Lindbergh as a symbol of American ambition. Financiers became celebrities and graced the covers of Forbes (started in 1917) and Time (started in 1923) for the first time. Those magazines may have declined in recent decades, but today this same message — of the thrill of a democratized financial sector where anyone can become rich — is fed to us in infinite scrolls on social media of aspiration and envy.

For decades, most Americans have missed out on the stock market’s riches: Nearly 40 percent of Americans don’t own any stock at all, and more than 90 percent of all equities are controlled by the wealthiest 10 percent of families. Access has long been fenced off by rules around “accredited investors,” a legal category created in the 1930s to protect households from risky, opaque offerings. The qualifications are strict: You need $1 million in net worth (excluding your home) or an income of at least $200,000 a year ($300,000 for a couple). The idea is that only the wealthy can afford to lose money in speculative deals. In practice, the definition gives the richest households — about 18 percent of American families — privileged entry into private markets. They can buy into companies like Facebook or Uber years before the public ever has the chance, capturing the overwhelming share of the gains. By the time the average investor can purchase shares on a stock exchange, much of the upside has already been taken.

Now that barrier is being steadily lowered. What was once a bright line meant to keep average investors out is being blurred in the name of access. It is not hard to see the appeal of breaking open those gates and allowing ordinary savers a shot at the kinds of returns that built fortunes for institutions and elites.

Yet history offers a blunt reminder: When transformation comes this quickly, it rarely benefits everyone unless it is paired with transparency, oversight, and regulation. The dot-com boom of the late 1990s was pitched as a democratizing moment, too, until it collapsed under a wave of hype and fraud. The pattern is familiar, stretching back to 1929: Whenever access expands faster than safeguards, charlatans rush in and ordinary investors are often left holding the bag.

The greatest speculative asset class of the past decade has been cryptocurrency, a realm where risk itself is part of the appeal. For years it was dismissed by some of the most venerated investors, like Warren Buffett, as a plaything for gamblers and thrill-seekers. But under a crypto-friendly Trump administration, a new group of financiers is working to reimagine it as something every American should own — not just through exchanges and wallets but through investment vehicles built to slip into retirement accounts and mutual funds.

No one has embraced this idea more passionately than Michael Saylor of the business-software company Strategy (formerly known as MicroStrategy). With his silver beard, clipped diction, and unblinking certainty, Saylor carries himself less like a corporate manager and more like a prophet who believes he has glimpsed the future before anyone else.

For most of its life, Strategy sold analytics tools to corporations. But Saylor has completely recast it. Over the past few years, he borrowed more than $2 billion through debt offerings and convertible notes to buy over 200,000 Bitcoins — worth more than $13 billion at recent prices. Today, Strategy’s stock no longer trades on software sales; it rises and falls almost entirely with the price of Bitcoin. For investors, the appeal is obvious: It is an easy way to buy into Bitcoin’s upside, wrapped in the familiar clothing of a public stock.

Saylor himself has become more than a chief executive; he is Bitcoin’s evangelist in chief. On podcasts, TV hits and conference stages, he preaches the virtues of “digital gold” with a fervor that blends salesman and prophet. To his followers, he is a folk hero who showed Wall Street how to bet big on the future. And so far, he has been right: As Bitcoin recovered from its 2022 crash, Strategy’s shares have soared — rising even faster than the coin itself. Nearly half the company’s stock is now held by retail investors. It is such a popular stock that it was added to the Nasdaq 100 index in late 2024, further attracting almost $4 million a day from individual traders, cementing its status as a cult favorite on Main Street as much as on Wall Street.

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Photo illustration by Ricardo Tomás

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For the nearly three-year-old female bat soaring into the Spanish skies in March 2023, it was just another night of striving to feed herself. But her overnight exploits were about to become the stuff that scientists’ dreams are made of.

The bat—a greater noctule (Nyctalus lasiopterus)—was equipped with a high-tech tag recording its behavior. And from one particular recording, researchers were able to reconstruct a story with both cinematic drama and scientific value. That’s because the tag captured the bat pursuing, killing and eating a migrating European robin (Erithacus rubecula)—all in midair and while echolocating to navigate.

“There was this crazy noise and movement and a lot of echolocation, and I thought, ‘I’ve never heard this before on any recording,’” says Laura Stidsholt, a biologist at Aarhus University in Denmark and co-author of new research about the observation, published on October 9 in Science. “It was quite magical.”

Greater noctules are among the largest and most endangered bats in Europe. Their usual fare is meatier insects—beetles and moths and the like. But in previous work, scientists analyzing the DNA found in bat poop had been surprised to find evidence of greater noctules feasting on songbirds—which are much larger than insects—during spring and fall migrations, when birds are active at night instead of during the day.

The bats are typically difficult to study, but scientists at Doñana Biological Station, an outpost of the Spanish National Research Council, have microchipped the bats that nest locally and can track when they enter and leave a nest box. The researchers paired that system with cutting-edge recording tags that captured an animal’s altitude and movement, as well as the sounds around it. During the springs of 2022 and 2023, the researchers tagged 14 different bats, gathering incredible reports of the furry mammals’ adventures.

It’s like flying with the greater noctule bat,” says Elena Tena, a conservation biologist at Doñana Biological Station and co-author of the new research. “We could interpret everything that the bat was doing.”

And from that recording that startled Stidsholt, the researchers constructed quite an interpretation: The female bat soared to an altitude of three-quarters of a mile, searching for prey, until it apparently locked in on a migrating songbird. Then it engaged with the bird and made a steep dive, during which the bat made its echolocation calls amid the sounds of an ongoing tussle between the two animals. As the bat approached the ground, the bird let out a string of panicked cheeps before ominously falling silent.

Then—for an incredible 23 minutes—the bat’s echolocation squeaks were punctuated by chewing and crunching, even as the animal kept flying. “They’re basically screaming with their mouths full,” Stidsholt says, noting that, proportional to their body size, these bats’ calls are among the loudest noises known to scientists.

Haunted by the incredible recording, the researchers asked some additional questions. First, they compared the bird’s distress calls with existing recordings of songbirds gathered by other scientists whose work requires catching the birds in nearly invisible “mist nets” to handle them. The cries of the bird caught by the bat matched those of the European robin.

The researchers also gathered torn-off bird wings found on the ground of known greater noctule hunting grounds. DNA testing confirmed saliva from these bats on the wings—supporting scientific hypotheses that, just as the bats do with their usual insect prey, the animals bite off and discard songbird wings after making a kill, likely to reduce the weight they carry while snacking.

That makes the finding particularly interesting, says Riley Bernard, a bat biologist at the University of Wyoming, who was not involved in the new research. “Even though these species do eat insects, and that might be their predominant food behavior, they have this behavioral plasticity to be able to tap into resources when they’re available,” she says. Such flexibility could help see the bats through the many challenges they face, she hopes.

Bernard admits to some envy of the European researchers, noting that North America’s bats are all much smaller than the greater noctule—too small to carry the tags used in this experiment.

Danilo Russo, an ecologist at the University of Naples Federico II, who was also not involved in the new research, agrees. “I’d really love to fit a small bat with this kind of technology,” Russo says.

“Now we have this amazing means of penetrating the darkness and their hidden world,” he says. “I think it would be a complete game-changer, just like in this case.”

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U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi gave a playful response to actress Amy Poehler’s parody of her on NBC’s “Saturday Night Live.”

Poehler, who hosted Saturday’s episode, appeared in the cold open as Bondi during her testimony at a Senate Judiciary Committee oversight hearing last week.

“My name is Pam Bondi. I spell it with an ‘i,’ because I ain’t gonna answer any of your questions,” Poehler said. “My time is valuable. The DOJ has many ongoing operations, and we’re moving like Kash Patel’s eyeballs—very quickly in multiple directions at once.”

Snl Says Trump’s Been In Office ‘100 Years’ While Mocking Papal Ambitions And Executive Order Frenzy

During the skit, Poehler was later joined by her fellow former “SNL” cast member Tina Fey, who played Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Kristi Noem carrying an AR-15 rifle.

“That’s right. It’s me, Kristi Noem,” Fey said. “I spell my name with an ‘i’ because that’s how I thought it was spelled. And I’m the rarest type of person in Washington, D.C.: a brunette that Donald Trump listens to.”

Though the show took many jabs at Bondi’s demeanor during the hearing, Bondi appeared to enjoy the parody on Sunday morning and invited Noem to respond on X.

Amy Poehler Says ‘We All Played People We Should Not Have’ As She Reflects On Controversial SNL Skits

“@Sec_Noem, should we recreate this picture in Chicago? Loving Amy Poehler!” Bondi wrote.

In a comment to Fox News Digital, DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin simply responded, “SNL is absolutely right—the Democrats’ shutdown does need to end!”

The long-running sketch comedy series has often mocked President Donald Trump and his administration, usually with some backlash from Trump himself. However, the show’s 51st season premiere went largely unremarked on by the president despite another parody of him by cast member James Austin Johnson.

Snl Compares Trump To Jesus In Easter Sketch Mocking Economy And Faith: ‘Donald Jesus Trump’

In a comment after the premiere, White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson dismissed the show, saying she has “more entertaining” things to do with her time.

“Reacting to this would require me to waste my time watching it,” Jackson said. “And like the millions of Americans who have tuned out from SNL, I have more entertaining things to do — like watch paint dry.”

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Tina Fey (left) as Kristi Noem and host Amy Poehler (right) as Pam Bondi during the “Bondi Hearing” Cold Open on Saturday, October 11, 2025.

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Now, many Israelis said, with an open-ended cease-fire in place and all the living hostages back home, it was time for the country to heal.

“This is a momentous day, a day of great joy,” Mr. Netanyahu said in an address in the Knesset, or Israeli Parliament, on Monday alongside President Trump.

Quoting from the biblical Book of Ecclesiastes, which Jews traditionally read this week, Mr. Netanyahu said there was a time for war and a time for peace.

“The last two years have been a time of war,” he added. “The coming years will hopefully be a time for peace — peace inside Israel and peace outside Israel.”

People began packing Hostages Square in Tel Aviv early Monday morning to watch the release unfold on giant screens. They lined the road, waving Israeli flags outside the Re’im military base in southern Israel, the first stop for the returnees after they crossed into Israeli territory. And they ran onto balconies and rooftops to cheer as helicopters brought the former captives to hospitals.

The military released footage of emotional reunions between the hostages and their family members, as well as extraordinary encounters among the former captives themselves.

Gali and Ziv Berman, 28, twins who were kidnapped on Oct. 7, 2023, together with their neighbor, Emily Damari, from Kfar Aza, a rural community, were separated by their captors on their first day in Gaza, according to Ms. Damari, who was released during a brief cease-fire in January.

On Monday, they hugged. The twins, who had lived close by and worked together before their abduction, were transferred to a hospital wearing matching yellow shirts of their favorite soccer team, Maccabi Tel Aviv. They were flown over the Bloomfield Stadium in Tel Aviv, where fans had gathered to cheer them.

Another pair of brothers, Ariel Cunio, 28, and David Cunio, 35, were released and reunited with their partners in Israel, both former captives themselves. Ariel Cunio had been kidnapped with his partner, Arbel Yehud, from their home in Nir Oz, a small community near the Gaza border that was ravaged in the Hamas assault. Ms. Yehud was released in January.

“My Ariel is home, and I am overwhelmed with emotion and joy,” Ms. Yehud said in a statement.

“From the moment of my release, I devoted everything I had to the struggle to bring my Ariel home, to bring David home, and to bring all the hostages back,” she added. “Now that Ariel and David are home, we can focus on our long journey of healing and recovery together as a couple and as a family.”

David Cunio was kidnapped from Nir Oz with his wife, Sharon Cunio, and their twin daughters, Yuli and Emma, 5, who were returned in November 2023.

And the brothers Eitan Horn and Iair Horn let out cries of joy as they embraced. Taken from Nir Oz, they spent time in the tunnels together until Iair was released in February, with Eitan left behind.

The 20 living hostages released on Monday were exchanged for nearly 2,000 Palestinians imprisoned in Israel. There are no more living captives in Gaza, but Israel was still waiting for Hamas to return the remains of 28 deceased ones. The Israeli military said it had received four coffins later Monday and that the authorities would work to identify the remains.

The government has said that locating some of the bodies might take some time.

“We do not forget them for a moment,” Brig. Gen. Effie Defrin, the Israeli military’s chief spokesman, said.

Israeli officials said about 1,200 people were killed in Israel and 251 others were abducted to Gaza during the Hamas-led attack on Israel in October 2023 that ignited the war. Hamas had already been holding two Israeli civilians for almost a decade and the remains of two soldiers killed in ambushes in Gaza in 2014.

Four women were released early on in October 2023, and a female soldier was rescued in a military operation that month. During two temporary cease-fires, in November 2023 and early this year, a total of 135 hostages were freed, according to government data. The Trump administration negotiated the release of an Israeli-American soldier in May. Seven more hostages were rescued alive by the Israeli military.

The remains of 59 captives who did not survive were returned to Israel for burial before Monday’s exchange, according to the Israeli government.

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Alon Ohel’s friends speaking with his family in a video call after receiving the news of his return to Israel from Gaza on Monday.Credit…Amit Elkayam for The New York Times

Alon Ohel was kidnapped by Hamas after fleeing the Nova music festival in October 2023. More than two years later, Hamas freed Mr. Ohel as part of a cease-fire deal with Israel.CreditCredit…David Guttenfelder/The New York Times

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