Get them all home
Phase One — intended to secure the release of 33 hostages — must be followed by phases two and three, intended to secure the release of all of the rest, living and dead

David Horovitz is the founding editor of The Times of Israel. He is the author of "Still Life with Bombers" (2004) and "A Little Too Close to God" (2000), and co-author of "Shalom Friend: The Life and Legacy of Yitzhak Rabin" (1996). He previously edited The Jerusalem Post (2004-2011) and The Jerusalem Report (1998-2004).

This Editor’s Note was sent out earlier Wednesday in ToI’s weekly update email to members of the Times of Israel Community. To receive these Editor’s Notes as they’re released, join the ToI Community here.
Farhan al-Qadi, the most recent Israeli hostage rescued alive by the IDF, emerged from a Hamas tunnel into the daylight in late August in what appeared to be astoundingly good shape.
A wiry 52-year-old Bedouin man, al-Qadi, who had been moved around several times during his more than 10 months in captivity, was extricated by the IDF from a tunnel where he had been held alone and from where his captors had fled. Despite the horrors he had endured, he was able to immediately and coherently answer Israeli security officials’ questions — to the point where he reportedly even supplied information that, had it been heeded, might just have saved the lives of other hostages held nearby.
A single day later, he was welcomed back to his home near Rahat and declared that he was feeling “100 percent.”

Another five months later, it would be near-miraculous if many, or any, of the hostages for whose freedom the nation is yearning were to come home in anything like al-Qadi’s remarkably robust condition. The weeklong truce at the end of November 2023 saw a series of daily releases, in a fraught process that constantly seemed close to collapse, where the conclusion of each day’s nail-biting border-transfer process allowed for unconstrained celebration as almost all of those who were released were in outwardly reasonable condition.
Their ordeal had been unthinkable, but, we now see, relatively brief. The 105 hostages who got out then had been held for some 50 days. Those whose fate is at stake now have been imprisoned, in conditions and circumstances we cannot begin to comprehend, for 467. Many of them are no longer alive.
After they are freed, there will be countless questions as to why it took so long for the State of Israel — which so utterly failed on October 7 in its prime obligation to keep its citizens safe from our enemies — to save them from their monstrous, mass-murdering captors.
Was the war against Hamas strategically mishandled? Was the kind of deal being finalized now possible many months ago? Were opportunities missed because Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu feared he would lose his governing majority, amid far-right opposition, as Otzma Yehudit leader Itamar Ben Gvir has indicated? Was his claim that retaining the Philadelphi Corridor along the Gaza-Egypt border was essential to Israel’s very existence merely an untenable political delaying tactic, as his sacked defense minister Yoav Gallant has contended? Or was Hamas, while it was still seeing Hezbollah intact and Iran confident, hitherto an implacable obstacle to a deal?
Could more hostages’ lives have been saved? Could fewer soldiers have lost their lives?

Will Hamas reconstitute itself, especially given Netanyahu’s refusal to work strategically on a framework for a non-Hamas day after in Gaza, and outgoing US Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s stunning assertion that Hamas, as the war has proceeded, has recruited as many new gunmen as Israel has killed? Will Israel be able to swiftly resume fighting, as US President-elect Donald Trump’s National Security Adviser Mike Waltz would appear to suggest will be necessary, and as Netanyahu insists will be the case? Or will Trump seek to ensure no fresh major outbreak of war, as he intimated in his victory speech, and as Hamas has been demanding these past many months?
The deal, if it is indeed broadly similar to the Israeli proposal conveyed to the mediators in late May, is incredibly problematic — a deal with the devil, which the devil, invigorated by the release of some 200 of its most dangerous terrorists, fully intends will enable it to revive and murderously thrive, in the West Bank as well as Gaza.
Endless questions await the essential powerhouse state commission of inquiry that Netanyahu is so fiercely resisting, and that will need to probe the events before, during and since the cataclysm of October 7, 2023. And endless challenges, external and internal, will still face Israel if and when the deal is done.
But first, all the hostages, the men, the women, the children, must come home, in what will be a process far more protracted and unquestionably more harrowing than what has gone before. Phase One — intended to secure the release of 33 hostages, not all of them alive — must be followed by phases two and three, intended to secure the release of all of the rest, living and dead.
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Thank you,
David Horovitz, Founding Editor of The Times of Israel