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thank you for spending part of your tuesday with us. "the beat" with ari melber starts right now. >> ali, always like to see you? how you doing? >> saw you in person last week even better. >> our thanks to alley velshi, our colleague here. welcome to "the beat." i'm ari melber. great to be back with you. tonight we're tracking new report on what former vice president pence told jack smith about trump's coup plot, and later how right of had wing nationalists are winning in south america to parts of europe, where some find that surprising. this new election sending shock wave about so-called maga populism and trump's -- abroad. everyone later a fun item of interest to what the -- i'll have this for and explain why we think it's a good thing by the end of the hour. all that coming up. our top story are the signs of kremtle progress in the middle east conference. today marking a sixth day of cease-fire or pause. hamas released two more hostages, including two thai hostages, all part of terrorism, the attack, the surprise where hamas kidnapped so many innocent civilians in that devastating attack in october, violating international law. israel is part of the same deal, releasing 30 palestinian prisoners. here the facts and numbers tonight. there have been over 15,000 deaths in total, over 14,000 in gaza which is bore the brunt of attacks, and over a thousand in israel. you see the numbers there. as for the hostages, which are crucial to the incremental omacy, 86 total hostages release in the conflict. hamas still holding an estimated 161 innocent civilians and hostages, including -- you see on the bottom there we're ing with the information we have -- the nine americans who are presumed hostages. now, if you catch up on this conflict it's of course been so important in the middle east and it's a big part of american foreign policy. historically if you think about this, a terror group taking and holding nine american hostages after killing 31 americans in that initial attack, that alone would be an enduring national security priority for this country and an ongoing national debate over what to do about what happened and what to do to get the others back. it would be huge news. yet at times as a matter of both policy and what people are focused on, that's been overshadowed by the sheer scale of the wider hamas attack and this ongoing clash in the region them war that hamas started has had huge costs on both sides, including what we just showed you, that dense area of gaza where roughly half the population with minors, with no say about what happens, what's being done on behalf of people in that region, that area, and what's being done to them coming from the other side. on that point, the biden administration emphasized is does stand strongly with israel against the terrorists but warned israel it must fight more surgically and avoid further mazz displacement of palestinians. according to "the new york times" report on your screen -- we'll put that up larger. i want toe see how "the times" pu the second part of the sentence is important. to quote, avoid a humanitarian crisis that overwhelms the wod's ability to respond. i mentioned diplomacy. that's part of the message comingtheiden administration as they stand with israel, and they've said that publicly, but also want to d something that really over the world's ability to respond another way soft saying there are limits to how much more the united states thinks israel should do with the bombing campaigns. as for the situation in gaza, more aid is being brought in. that's part of the deal. vehicles coming in and trucks bringing the aid. as for the diplomacy and intelligence, that continues. the heads of the cia and israel's intelligence agency negotiated in qatar on this deal which bids for more hostage releases, a larger pause in fighting. we touch on the numbers that tell part of the story. there's a human side to all this. it is the many families living through the agony of their missing children and family members among terrorists who have shown they're willing to murder. it is a story that since the inception of us covering sit hard to tell and hard to capture. there are so many innocent people caught up in this. i can tell you tonight after some 49 days of separation, we are seeing what happens when some of these people, some of these, in this case children, are finally reunited. one family talking with nbc reporter rob sanchez. >> reporter: this 9-year-old was released friday with his mother and grandmother ruth. they spent 49 days in gaza aspiriner of hamas. >> they were with one guy who kept them all the time. she told me he did that. they were scared. whispering. >> were they ever tortured by hamas? >> no, i don't think so. >> reporter: they said they never saw others. they were moved through tunnels and apartments. >> they didn't get a lot of food. to go to the bathroom, they had to knock on the door, and then one and a half hours waiting or two hours. >> that is just one mother with one story. we struggle through many of these conflicts when we cover ukraine, to get back to the human side of it. there's the palestinian side, the other piece of this diplomacy, hostage releases. israel's released 150 prisoners. we have photos -- i want to show this to everyone in full. just talking to our control room. let's look at some of the photos we got. these are new, of the reaction of the families and other individuals, friends and families reunited, mostly younger individuals. we have reports of some being teenagers. we don't have to same type of video. that speaks to sort of access points. and i always tell you we endeavor to bring you different things. this is some of what we've seen in the reaction. i want to bring in aaron miller for the carnegie endowment for international peace. how important is it -- and do you view this as an onramp for more diplomacy, or too early to tell? >> we tend to lose sight, and i put myself at the top of the list -- default to the position of animals, but i think the humanitarian tragedy, the terrorist surge on october 7th, the indiscriminant nature of the killing, you have palestinian deaths and humanitarian catastrophe building as a consequence of israel's efforts to eradicate hamas, which embeds its military assets in and around areas, institutions, buildings that are proximate to civilian areas. it's a cruel dilemma, and i think the cruelty of it is going to in essence leave two societies deeply traumatized in the wake of this. each of the societies are going to have to go through a period of, i think, political reckoning, and i'm hoping -- perhaps against hope -- as has been so often the case in break-throughs in the past, that every break-through is proceeded by terror insurgency and war. >> you use the word -- yeah, you use the word reckoning. you have a lot of people within israel who look at bebe netanyahu and his hard line policies as a failure. it can be harder to get a judgment, but there are many -- at least some voices in gaza and the west bank that do not think what hamas has done has brought about an improvement in the situation, although it's a complex picture. let me turn to you qatar specifically. what do you see as the potential there? is this probably the biggest break-through we're going to see for a while? >> i think the administration clearly made a judgment that they can figure out a way, hopefully, to get more hostages out, and it coincides with hamas' strategy, trading hostages for time. but it also serves two important purposes. you get hostages out, and you can surge humanitarian assistance in. that's the logic here. the question s how long will the israelis play what is obviously a cruel game on the part of hamas, which ultimately hopes that pressure will build inside the country from the hostages' families who are not release and external pressure from the biden administration and others and press for what hamas really is, which is a cessation of hostilities and be able to claim that they survived this onslaught, released palestinian prisoners? that would be a tremendous victory for hamas and a defeat both for the government of israel and i think to the biden administration. >> yeah. it's complicated. it's incremental. but when you look at those picture you realize amidst all som this some lives are better to be -- we turn to the home front where rupert murdoch is under more legal heat. and georgia prosecutors making a big call in the rico case, which is bad news for trump in a related case businessman the first federal trial we're bracing for. we're going to get to that when i'm back with you in just 60 seconds. in just 60 seconds. in 99% of people over 50. it's lying dormant, waiting... and could reactivate. shingles strikes as a painful, blistering rash that can last for weeks. and it could wake at any time. think you're not at risk for shingles? 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>> i don't know that it's progress at all. i think all of it will fail. i mean, i don't think anybody is going to believe that mike pence was biassed against trump. he seems pretty loyal to him, almost like a george mcfly to his biff tannin. but at the end, what does george mcfly do? strikes a knockout punch, and that's what i think will happen at this trial. he was loyal. he didn't have any reason to go against trump. he had every reason to try and say in office buck he did the right thing at the end. >> hugo, i'll sure you'll reference the time machine references from "back to the future." before your time. might be over your head. we appreciate the honesty. rick and morety, are you familiar with that? >> yeah. >> that's a fictional universe that grew out of the "back to the future" universe. >> wow. well, there you go. >> imagine if you have a time machine, which they did have, you can use it for good or evil, as we learned in the trilogy. not to digress too much. i'm not going to put you on the spot if you don't know that particular film. but when you see this part about, oh, pence might have skipped the whole thing -- because it's a what if and didn't happen, i don't know how much criminal liability is there, but i thought it was interesting it came up, and someone who's covered this closely, we kept an eye on it as well, what cow read into that? pressure campaign built to the point and the political cost was going to be such that at least mike pence at one point in time was writing down his excuse for skip his biggest assignment of the year? >> i think it kind of shows a kind of a window into the real high-pressure situation that pence was in at the time and how curiously i think there was a discussion and clearly some kind of steps towards having not -- pence be there on january 6th. and for that to either be a contingent election, have slates go up. for a long time, we didn't know if this was something that was, you know, formally discussed. if you look at pence's notes, pence is saying, at this point i'm not going to preside on january 6th, and was only talked out of it by his 20-year-old son. >> because the obvious implication is, he skips so they can put in a thug. en they wanted a thug. mike pence had been loyal to donald trump about everything, as we learned in the political hearings. he's super politically loyal. won't do a coup. he would step out to not have someone do what he did, but he would put in a fixer who would do want trump wanted him to do. >> he would be a fixer because pence would not do what he wanted him to do. this was something that came up in discussions with steve bannon and other people on the fringes who were more interested in that strategy. or even if you were to have it as john eastman wanted, which is some sort of, we don't know what's going on. we won't encounter -- pence was not willing to go with any of that. >> that goes to where i think there is a challenge for jack smith, kristy, for all the bananas, circus stuff, and what it was in service of. so, donald trump has talked brazy -- wild or crazy -- about many topics. not always important ones. this was important. the committee, i want to show, looked at the all the ways he was attacking pence as easily -- it's easily possible to start feeling like this is a beltway coup edition of "real housewives" with all these people who deserve each other fighting and calling each other names. how do you take this to a jury and make it matter? let's look at that sound. >> i remember hearing th