Hello and welcome back to The Best & The Brightest, your Tuesday foreign policy edition. I’m Julia Ioffe.

Winter is here for Ukraine, and yesterday, White House budget director Shalanda Young wrote a letter to lawmakers on both sides of the aisle, sounding the alarm. “I want to be clear: without congressional action, by the end of the year we will run out of resources to procure more weapons and equipment for Ukraine and to provide equipment from U.S. military stocks,” she wrote. “There is no magical pot of funding available to meet this moment. We are out of money—and nearly out of time.”

Ukraine is currently mired in a stalemate on the front, and the rift between the country’s political and military leadership continues to grow. Ukraine’s energy infrastructure is even more fragile this year than it was a year ago. One government source in Kyiv told me that this winter will be even worse than last year’s, and the capital is once again coming under attack by waves of Moscow’s Iran-made Shahed drones. The West, meanwhile, is distracted by the war in Gaza, which is one reason Vladimir Putin has been so kind to Hamas, even welcoming their leaders in Moscow. The terrorist group did in one day what Putin has been trying to do for nearly two years: get the West to forget about Ukraine.

In Washington, Ukraine’s supporters on the Hill and in the administration are distressed by Young’s message. “I’m worried about Ukraine,” one senator texted shortly after Young’s letter was made public. If funding runs out as it is supposed to in the next couple weeks, administration officials confessed, there’s not too much the U.S. can do to support Kyiv.

Still, there’s a guarded hope inside the administration that the funding for Ukraine will get through. It is still an issue with broad bipartisan support and if it were to go to a vote, it would pass. The issue before had been that Kevin McCarthy refused to bring it to the floor for fear of alienating his even more hard-right, isolationist members (we know how that played out). Mike Johnson twice voted against the aid packages but, since becoming speaker, he has come out in favor of helping Ukraine. “We can’t allow Vladimir Putin to march through Europe, and we understand the necessity of assisting there,” he said last week, adding that he felt a “sense of urgency.” This has people in the Biden administration convinced that the aid package will pass, eventually, just in the nick of time, as always. What it continues to do to our allies’ view of our international commitments is another matter.

Now, on to today’s topic. But first, Abby Livingston reports from the Hill…

• The Senate’s House-itis: A few years ago, a former senior House Republican staffer explained the difference in cultures between the Senate and House: “The Senate is an exclusive country club,” this person told me. “But over in the House, it’s sometimes like a truck stop that just about anyone can wander into.”

  Over the last several months, though, several longtime Republican Hill insiders have individually made the case to me that, with each election cycle, the Senate has taken on the House’s instability. Perhaps the stalemate over Ukraine funding and border security is clear enough evidence that the Senate would already be as messy as the House—if it weren’t for the nihilism exhibited by mostly Republican House members over the last six months.

  That brings us to this week, in which senators have traded social media swipes over the deadly serious matter of Ukraine funding. Chris Murphy and John Cornyn, senators who genuinely seem to like working together, were at odds in public on Monday. Today, Mitt Romney called Democrats “clueless.” Ted Cruz, of course, has been slinging mud for years. But what should scare Ukrainians is that these are the senators who are good at cutting many of the deals that do eventually get passed. Punchbowl’s Andrew Desiderio reports that some Republican senators abruptly walked out of an administration briefing on Ukraine, and that Tom Cotton reportedly shouted down briefers. Even if the Senate’s slouching toward silliness remains comparatively weak compared to what’s happening over in the House, these are not encouraging signs for the future.

• Adios, McHenry: Meanwhile, Patrick McHenry, an overnight C-SPAN sensation as the temporary speaker this past fall, announced his retirement on Tuesday. This one was expected—his name bounced around all summer as the Republican most likely to step down. His departure falls into the category of “committee chairs who hit their term limit and have no interest in going back to the rank-and-file.”

  This exit represents yet more institutional memory out the door, specifically on Wall Street regulation. But McHenry will leave another hole in the conference: He was an effective, albeit unofficial, whip and vote counter.

• All Eyes on Heye: Here’s a rumor bouncing around the D.C. holiday party circuit in reaction to the McHenry decision: Prominent former Republican Hill staffer Doug Heye, a native of Winston-Salem (which is in McHenry’s district), is possibly winding up for a congressional run. Heye came up through the North Carolina delegation as a staffer to Richard Burr; he’s a former R.N.C. spokesman, ex-CNN analyst, Brooks Brothers rioter, and he served in House leadership as a staffer. A source familiar with Heye’s thinking says this is a serious consideration. Further fueling the rumors? Not long after McHenry’s announcement, Heye posted on Twitter/X a photo of a barbecue/fried chicken restaurant and wrote: “Best place in Winston-Salem to announce a Congressional run?”

The Israelis were stunned. “Our deal was [releasing] the women,” one senior Biden administration official told me about the collapse and the Israelis’ thinking. “We’ll take the men, sure, but they’re not going to jump the line.” Still, Hamas refused to release the remaining women in its custody, the ceasefire collapsed, and we’re now back to watching the resumption and expansion of Israel’s military operation in Gaza.

Three senior administration officials confirmed to me that this is the going hypothesis in the White House: that the Israeli women still in Hamas custody are young, in their 20s and 30s, and Hamas members have raped and sexually assaulted them. “Everyone assumes it seems to be the case,” said one of the sources. “It’s quite ugly.” Said a second senior administration official, “That is our going assumption, that at least one reason they’re unwilling to let these young ladies go is that they have been sexually assaulting them.”

According to one of the sources, one of the women is 19-year-old Naama Levy, a new soldier who, in a widely circulated video, was seen being pulled off the back of a vehicle in Gaza on October 7. She is bloodied, barefoot, and terrified, and the seat of her gray sweatpants was stained with blood, leading many observers to suspect that she had been raped.

None of the three officials said they had seen concrete, specific proof that this was why Hamas refused to hand over the remaining women in their custody. Rather, they said that this was the supposition of the Israeli government, and that the U.S. believes this is a reasonable conclusion based on Hamas’s strange unwillingness to hand them over. Within the administration, however, there is a difference of opinion as to why Hamas wouldn’t want to release the female hostages its men have allegedly raped. One source speculated that this was because Hamas didn’t want the story out there that it was raping Israeli women. “It’s haram,” the source explained. For Hamas, “Murdering civilians is okay, but rape very much isn’t. I don’t know if you have seen their responses to the accusations of rape so far, but they have vociferously denied it and talked about how it’s prohibited by their faith and they would never do it.”

But a second senior administration official disputed that reasoning. “I don’t think Hamas gives a flying fuck” about what the hostages say when they’re released, this official contended. “What I understand is, part of the assumption is just that they don’t want to release them because they want to continue to abuse them.”

There were also cases of Israeli men who were raped or had their genitalia cut or shot off. In one case, a dead person’s genitals were so badly mutilated that investigators couldn’t tell if it had been a man or a woman.

In the last week, however, that strategy has mostly been dispensed with, at least abroad. The accounts of Hamas’s sexual terror flooded the informational space, along with very legitimate claims of hypocrisy aimed at international organizations, like the U.N., who were very loud about the very real plight of Palestinian women and girls, but silent about their Israeli counterparts. On Monday, a several-hundred-strong protest at the U.N.’s headquarters in New York included appearances from Sheryl Sandberg and Hillary Clinton, as well as Israel’s U.N. ambassador Gilad Erdan. “Silence is complicity,” Sandberg announced. Protestors carried posters that proclaimed “#MeToo unless you’re a Jew.”

On one hand, it is important that these stories are told. If the victims had to endure it, then we have to endure the knowing and remembering. That is the argument for justice and an accurate historical record.

On the other is the political argument: It is important to highlight that this is what people are justifying when they justify Hamas’s attack on October 7. It is important to show that, when the Western left says “Believe all women,” they might not mean “Believe Israeli women” or even “Believe Jewish women.” It is important to show how emphasizing “context” when discussing October 7 can slide quickly into apologia, in the way that how much a rape survivor had to drink could also be considered “context.”

But this is also where it gets tricky. When I asked members of the administration why they thought the Israeli government was pushing so hard to get these grotesque stories out there now, one of them put it this way. “Hamas has been holding children hostage, and somehow Israel lost the debate over who has the moral high ground,” the official said. “The hostages were completely forgotten by the international community. It’s totally fair to criticize Israeli airstrikes—but to just completely lose sight of children held hostage is kind of shocking.” The source added, “I’m amazed by the number of people defending Hamas. It’s like, man, really? I get having issues with what Israel is doing, but really?”

And that, it seems, is the point: to make Hamas even more impossible to defend, to make the Israeli campaign against the terror organization harder to criticize, and to undermine the credibility of international organizations who have been criticizing the Israeli government. Israeli women were brutalized on October 7, and now they will help the Israeli government regain the moral high ground it has lost over the last two months.