After 843 days, with return of Ran Gvili’s body, Times of Israel takes down its ‘Israel at War’ counter

With the return of Ran Gvili’s body, The Times of Israel overnight took down the “Israel at War” counter from the masthead of the site, 843 days after the Hamas-led invasion, massacre and mass abductions in southern Israel.

Gvili, 24, a police officer who put on his uniform and went to war with a broken shoulder on October 7, 2023, battled the invading terrorists at Kibbutz Alumim for hours before he was killed and his body taken to Gaza. He was the last hostage, living or dead, held by Gaza’s terror groups and was located and identified by IDF troops at al-Batash cemetery in Gaza City’s Shejaiya neighborhood on Monday.

In an op-ed article six weeks ago entitled “Waiting for Ran Gvili,” The Times of Israel’s editor David Horovitz noted that several readers had written in about the counter on the site, “advancing compelling reasons to argue that the war is now over, and compelling reasons to assert that it is not,” with “more making the first argument than the second.”

“Wars tend to end with ceasefires, and a ceasefire agreement of sorts was indeed signed by Israeli and Hamas representatives in Sharm el-Sheikh on October 9 this year, was sort of approved by the Israeli government, and took effect the following day,” Horovitz wrote. Furthermore, “US President Donald Trump, who was central to the brokering of that agreement, has repeatedly declared the war over, and made clear his determination to prevent a resurgence of intense military conflict.” And, finally, “Most of Israel’s troops have withdrawn from the Gaza Strip, most reservists have been sent home, and the IDF has generally, though not exclusively, been confining itself to defensive operations.”

Nonetheless, the editor went on, he was “not quite persuaded” that the time had come to take the counter down, in large part because Gvili’s body had not yet been returned: “We owe it to him, and his loved ones, to make the symbolic decision to wait a little longer before declaring that the war in which he knowingly put his life on the line for his nation, and lost that life protecting his people from the invading terrorist army of the quasi-nation next door, is over.”

In an op-ed on Monday, written as Gvili’s body was being transported back into Israel, Horovitz underlined that one of the two essential goals of the war had still not been achieved. “Hamas, it should not require stressing, has not wavered from its goal of eliminating Israel. Rather, it evidently concluded that releasing, first, all 20 remaining living hostages and now, finally, the last of the 28 deceased hostages, has paved the best path to avoiding ongoing, potentially intensified US-backed Israeli military pressure. Still controlling almost half of Gaza, it believes it is creating conditions under which it will be able to fudge the issue of what exactly becomes of its arms, rebuild its personnel and resources, continue to benefit from the support of a world full of Israel-haters and fools, await more conducive US leadership, and resume its ‘resistance’ to the Jewish state.”

But the recovery of Gvili’s body, he continued, “formally completes the first phase of US President Donald Trump’s broader peace plan for Gaza, and ushers in the next phases, under which Hamas is supposed to relinquish its weapons, the Strip is to be demilitarized, the IDF is to gradually withdraw, and a new, non-threatening Gaza is to be eventually constructed.”

“Most imminently, Ali Shaath, the former Palestinian Authority deputy minister appointed to head the National Committee for the Administration of Gaza, announced on Thursday that the Rafah Crossing between Gaza and Egypt would open within days in both directions. And Netanyahu, who is deeply wary that any such concession will be abused by the still-potent Hamas, reluctantly went along, to the fury of his far-right coalition partners. His office on Sunday night conditioned reopening the crossing on the completion of the search for Gvili’s body — a condition now successfully met.”

In short, “Hamas is not destroyed” but “the war in its current form is over.”

And with the return of Gvili’s body, Horovitz concluded, “Israel’s political and military leadership has cleared a critical hurdle in rebuilding its relationship with the citizenry it so catastrophically failed to protect 843 days ago. The hostages have been returned. To the very last one.”