By Mitchell Bard, JNS
Their captivity corroded Israelis’ faith in their leaders and fractured the social contract between citizen and state. Even now, a lingering sense of abandonment persists.
Two hundred fifty-one hostages. Infants and the elderly. Civilians and soldiers. Israelis and foreign nationals. That number alone defined defeat.
On Oct. 7, 2023, Israel didn’t just endure a massacre; it suffered the humiliation of seeing its people dragged into Gaza as trophies, paraded and tormented. After 738 days of unimaginable torture, they are finally home. Israel’s nightmare has ended. Its trauma has not.
Hamas knew precisely what it was doing. The elderly, the children, the women—these were intentional targets, not collateral victims. They were chosen for maximum leverage to exploit Israel’s conscience and divide its society. Hamas weaponized grief, disseminating videos of captives to break Israeli morale. As former Israeli intelligence officer Noga Helvi has written, Hamas turned hostage families into pawns, terrorizing them with silence, with uncertainty and with the cruel absence of closure.
The hostages became the single-most enduring symbol of Israel’s agony. For two years, they embodied both the nation’s suffering and its resilience. In the popular imagination, the Israel Defense Forces would have mounted an Entebbe-style miracle. Instead, the reality has been devastating. Of the original 251, only eight were rescued alive. In one of the most searing tragedies, IDF soldiers mistakenly shot three hostages who had managed to escape their terrorist captors. Others may have perished under the bombs meant for their abductors.
Thankfully, 148 hostages returned alive in two ceasefires and five more separately. Fifty-eight bodies were repatriated. Thanks to the pressure exerted by U.S. President Donald Trump, the last 20 living hostages are back at home with their loved ones. That any hostages survived two years in Gaza’s tunnels is a triumph of the human spirit, if not a miracle itself. The return of the bodies of those murdered is no less critical to healing the nation’s wounds and providing families the cruel mercy of finality.
Some hostage families supported the government’s stance that the destruction of Hamas took precedence over making a deal for the captives. Understandably, most demanded their loved ones’ return at almost any cost. Unable to protest Hamas, they turned their anguish on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. They saw a leader more intent on preserving his coalition (and, as some have said, evading possible conviction) than saving lives. It took 636 days after the massacre before he went to Kibbutz Nir Oz, which had 117 of its 400 residents either kidnapped or murdered. He never visited Hostages Square in Tel Aviv to express empathy for the families.
Indicative of the fraying of Israeli society that Hamas provoked, Netanyahu often lashed out at them, convinced that the protests were an extension of the movement that opposed his attempted overhaul of judicial reform. He even blamed them for hardening Hamas’s position. He wasn’t entirely wrong: Hamas had every reason to keep the hostages as fuel for Israel’s internal divisions and as leverage for the war that started soon after Oct. 7. Still, his critics overlooked the fact that bringing the hostages home would more likely strengthen his hold on power. Now that they are home, he believes he has been vindicated, though Israelis know better. They recognize that it was pressure applied by Trump on Israel and supporters of Hamas, not the IDF, that secured their freedom.
Moreover, many Israelis wonder whether a less obstinate leader could have brought them home sooner. Former Biden administration officials claim that Netanyahu rejected a similar deal months ago—one that might have spared countless lives. Yet none of those earlier offers guaranteed the release of everyone without a complete Israeli withdrawal. Only now, after Hamas was weakened militarily and cornered politically was such a deal possible.
Netanyahu’s primary objective of destroying Hamas was thwarted, however, by Trump. The group is far from vanquished, as it proved immediately after the ceasefire by recalling about 7,000 fighters to begin arresting and executing its rivals in the Gaza Strip, which it has been doing for days now.
Defeating Hamas and freeing all the hostages was probably always mutually exclusive.
Paradoxically, it was the failed assassination attempt in Doha that proved to be the catalyst for a ceasefire. Trump forced Netanyahu into a humiliating apology to the Qatari emir, who, in turn, extracted from the president a promise that the United States would defend Qatar. Now Doha owed Trump a favor. Under pressure from Washington, Qatar leaned hard on Hamas to accept the Trump Mideast peace plan.
Netanyahu couldn’t refuse Trump’s demands, though he most likely expected Hamas to reject the proposal, giving him the pretext to keep fighting and doing so with the president’s hechsher. Hamas surprised everyone by accepting the framework and buying its survival, albeit with caveats that could still derail the next phase. The hostages by then had become more a liability than a leverage point.
Yet Hamas also bought freedom for murderers. It is a moral dilemma Israel has faced repeatedly since abandoning the pretense that it would not negotiate with terrorists. Israelis are well aware that among the more than 1,000 prisoners released to win the freedom of captured IDF soldier Gilad Shalit in 2011 was Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, the mastermind of the Oct. 7 attack. For the families of hostages, this is known but irrelevant. Who can blame them for asking the government to pay any price for the return of a family member?
For the government—and for Israeli society at large—the prospect of releasing more Sinwar-like killers remains deeply troubling. Hamas demanded, though Israel refused, the freedom of several notorious figures: Marwan Barghouti, mastermind of deadly attacks that marked the years of the Second Intifada from 2000 to 2005; Ahmad Sa’adat, who ordered the 2001 assassination of Tourism Minister Rehavam Ze’evi; and Abbas al-Sayyid, architect of the 2002 Passover hotel massacre that killed 30 civilians. Among the 250 security prisoners Israel did release were others no less dangerous. History suggests that many will return to terror, further undermining Netanyahu’s already tenuous goal of eradicating Hamas.
The asymmetry is agonizing. Innocent civilians abducted from their homes and a music festival on a Shabbat and holiday morning were exchanged for individuals who planned and executed destruction and murder. None of the Israeli soldiers taken had done anything to provoke the violence against them. Several were unarmed female observers—some snatched from their beds, still wearing pajamas.
Each day the hostages languished in captivity only strengthened Hamas’s narrative of victory. They successfully undermined their rivals in the West Bank by holding off the mighty IDF for more than two years, forcing its withdrawal, while winning the release of more than 1,700 Palestinians. Polls show that West Bank Palestinians, who have not suffered from Hamas’s actions, have praised them and prefer its leaders to the corrupt Palestinian Authority that many around the world have suggested should rule Gaza.
Trump has once again proven that presidents, not prime ministers, end Israel’s wars. And while many hail this as a Nobel Peace Prize-worthy achievement, the regional peace he hopes to have brokered may only be a mirage. He kept Israel from finishing off Hezbollah; the terror group remains alive and rebuilding in northern Lebanon. He prevented Israel from destroying Iran’s nuclear stockpile and its ballistic missiles, and provoking regime change. He left the Houthis damaged but intact. Now he has stopped Israel from destroying Hamas.
Within hours of the ceasefire, there were reports of Hamas “police” on the streets. Thousands of fighters survived. Tunnels and weapons caches remain undiscovered. Aid is starting to flow again—to civilians and terrorists alike. Critical points of Trump’s peace plan—disarming and expelling members of Hamas—remain unfulfilled, with no mechanism for enforcing them.
The freeing of the hostages, at last, is a reason for celebration. However, their release does not ameliorate the damage done to Israeli society. Their captivity corroded Israelis’ faith in their leaders and fractured the social contract between citizen and state. Even now, a lingering sense of abandonment persists.
The related wounds—psychological, political, moral—will outlast the war, with the ordeal of the hostages standing as the starkest symbol of Israel’s failure to protect its citizens.
Part I: Gaza and the illusion of victory
Part II: Israel bloodied Hezbollah, but only Lebanon can defeat it
Part III: Houthis keep the rockets coming
Part IV: Unexpected consequences in Syria
Part V: A ravaged economy
Next: Part VII: Breaking the IDF
