The question before us is not whether the hostages must be brought home – that is beyond dispute. The question is how.
The answer is clearer than ever: the only viable path to bring all of Israel’s hostages home is to bring Hamas to total defeat and submission.
Repeatedly, Israel has tried diplomacy. Through mediators in Doha and Cairo, we have offered phased deals, humanitarian aid, and significant compromises. Hamas has responded with silence, maximalist demands, and psychological warfare. Again and again, it has proven that it does not seek an agreement – it seeks a strategic victory through delay, manipulation, and international pressure.
This must end. Because the longer we pursue an illusion of negotiated release, the longer our hostages suffer in tunnels, the longer Hamas rules Gaza, and the longer the war drags on – for Israelis and Palestinians alike.
The idea that war must now be managed, rather than won, is a postmodern fallacy. In recent decades, some have come to believe that no side should ever be brought to its knees – that we must inflict just enough pain to incentivize negotiation, but not so much that we risk decisive outcomes. This theory has guided the West in many failed conflicts. Still, war without victory does not produce peace – it produces stalemate, entropy, and misery.
What is to become of the hostages?
Those who say Hamas cannot be defeated because it is an idea ignore history. Slavery was an idea. So was Nazism. So was Soviet Communism. These ideologies endured – until the regimes that embodied them collapsed. We do not need to defeat every terrorist with a gun: We need to break the system that allows Hamas to command, control, and coerce.
And what of the hostages? Every pause in fighting, every generous offer, every opening of humanitarian routes has not shortened their captivity – it has prolonged it. It has allowed Hamas to regroup, reframe the narrative, and raise its demands. Meanwhile, they release videos of skeletal prisoners digging their own graves. This is not negotiation – it is psychological torture.
There are risks to military action. We must acknowledge them honestly. Yet those who warn that continued fighting may endanger the hostages must now admit the opposite: every delay and every ceasefire has endangered them more. Delay gives Hamas time. And time, for the hostages, is deadly.
The war has been long. But that is because we have given Hamas too many opportunities to survive. If the international community had supported decisive Israeli action from the beginning, the war – and the suffering – might already be over. The tragedy is that those who claim to speak for human rights have adopted a strategy that ensures longer wars, greater famine, and prolonged captivity.
We are told that Hamas is too extreme to surrender. But extremism does not make regimes invincible – it makes them dangerous. And dangerous regimes must be brought to submission, not managed.
This is not about revenge – it is about results. The hostages must be rescued. And the only way to do so is to make Hamas raise a white flag.
Israel did not choose this war. But we must choose how it ends. The choice is not between war and peace. The choice is between prolonged limbo – or decisive victory.
For the sake of the hostages, and all those who live under Hamas’s terror, victory is the only moral path.
The writer is a Likud MK.