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The Hostage Deal Is the Price of Israel’s Failures
Michael Oren
January 15, 2025

…From day one—October 7, 2023—Israel’s twin goals in Gaza were fundamentally irreconcilable. Israel could not, as its leaders pledged, simultaneously destroy Hamas and secure all of the hostages’ release. The terrorists who regarded the hostages as the key to their survival would hardly give them up for less than an Israeli commitment to end—and therefore lose—the war. Israelis, for their part, were torn between those who felt that they could not send their children to the army as long as hostages remained in captivity and those who held that, if Hamas wins, Israel will not have an army at all. Still, Israel believed that by increasing military pressure on Hamas, it could compel the terrorists to free the hostages. The strategy appeared to work when, in November 2023, Hamas released 105 of its 251 hostages in exchange for a weeklong ceasefire and the freeing of 240 Palestinian prisoners from Israeli jails. READ MORE

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