The hostages held in Gaza will not be recovered alive unless Israel gives major concessions and leaves Hamas in power. While of course Israel wants to get them back alive, Israeli military options are severely constrained if that is the goal. Hamas has grown comfortable taking hostages and using them as shields to temper Israeli military responses. The goals of toppling Hamas and getting the hostages back alive are not consistent. Israel faces a tough choice.

Now the death toll exceeds 1400, the number of hostages are over 200, and the brutality and savagery of Hamas, with gruesome physical and sexual defilement even of dead bodies, has shocked Israelis and the civilized part of the civilized world (i.e. excluding western leftists and Islamists). //

NBC News reports on what it witnessed:

The brutality and elation of Hamas militants as they killed Israeli civilians — including babies, young children and the elderly — is evident in an Israeli government compilation of videos shown to two dozen journalists in New York on Friday.

The videos, which were aired for the first time outside of Israel, consist mostly of GoPro, cellphone and dashcam footage recorded by the attackers themselves.

Israeli officials said they showed the compilation to President Joe Biden when he visited Israel on October 18th. They also showed it to a group of journalists in Israel, including NBC’s Raf Sanchez, on Wednesday. The atrocities depicted suggest that jihadism has evolved in chilling and perverse new ways. //

Israeli first responders were initially barred from taking videos or photographs of the dead out of respect for their families, officials said. But a decision was made to film what they found in order to preserve evidence of atrocities. Israeli officials said the video compilation is the most comprehensive visual evidence of war crimes carried out by Hamas.

Both a virtue and a weakness of Israeli society is the overwhelming concern for Israelis captured by Hamas or other terrorist groups.

In 2011, after his family mounted a public pressure campaign that ended up almost paralyzing Israeli society, the government agreed to exchange over 1000 terrorists in its custody for Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit. Israeli society paid a very steep price for that exchange. By 2018, over one-third of Palestinian terrorists freed in the 2011 hostage deal returned to terror. Among the freed terrorists were almost the entire present Gaza military leadership of Hamas responsible for planning the October 7 attack. Thousands of Israelis died to recover one Israeli hostage.

Will Israeli society succumb to the pressure now that there are over 200 hostages, including babies and children? Already there are signs of a pressure campaign building. //

One can feel for the families and the hostages, but also understand that such a hostage-for-prisoner exchange would mean thousands more Israelis would die in the future, and Hamas would remain in power.

The horrors of what Hamas did may be what holds Israel together in its goal of eliminating Hamas, which is not consistent with getting all the hostages back alive. That’s the hard truth.