Redeem the Hostages -- Encourage More Hostage-Taking: Israel's Dilemma on its Mission to Destroy Hamas

"The objective is for this war to end very differently from all of the previous rounds. There has to be a clear victory."

"[Weakening Hamas was not enough] whatever has to be done to fundamentally change the situation will have to be done." 

Chuck Freilich, former deputy national security adviser, Israel

"We don't know the exact number [of hostages now held by Hamas] and we are still checking."

"Definitely I cannot say how much we will factor in the fact that we have maybe an unprecedented number of hostages in Gaza ... But it's not going to stop us, prevent us, from doing what we need to do in order to secure the future of Israel."

"Of course we want to see all of our boys, girls, grandmothers, everyone who was abducted, we want to see them back home."

"But right now, our focus ... is to obliterate Hamas terrorist capabilities."

Gilad Erdan, Israeli Ambassador to the United Nations

Israeli hostages taken by Hamas (Screenshot)

Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad after storming into Israel Saturday morning, slaughtering hundreds of residents in their homes and streets in towns near the Gaza border, are now holding captive roughly 150 Israeli soldiers and civilians. Mobilization of Israeli reservists swiftly was expanded to 360,000 in response to the unprecedented invasion by Palestinian terrorists. It took days of offensive/defensive conflict but by Tuesday Israel's military had regained control over those areas that Hamas attacked in Israel's south.

 

Now the question on observers' minds is whether Israel will launch a ground assault into Gaza, governed by Hamas since 2007. A large portion of Gaza City's Rimal neighbourhood, the elite section of the city, was reduced on Tuesday to rubble by warplanes from Israel bombarding the area the night before. Hundreds of targets were struck in upscale Rimal, home to ministries of the Hamas government, including universities, media organizations and offices of aid agencies.

 

After warning civilians to evacuate targeted neighbourhoods, Israel launched their devastating attacks. Residents of nearby al-Daraj were told to evacuate and new explosions rocked the area soon afterward as well as in Rimal. Fishing boats were sent aflame when one strike hit the seaport of Gaza City. That same day Hamas fired barrages of rockets toward Ashkelon and Tel Aviv; no casualties were reported.

 

An emergency personnel works to extinguish a fire after rockets were launched from the Gaza Strip, as seen from the city of Ashkelon, Israel, October 7, 2023.(Amir Cohen/Reuters)

In Israel-Hamas conflicts between 2008 and 2021, four rounds were ended inconclusively, Hamas battered but still in control of Gaza. There is now intense pressure after the barbarously grotesque nature of this latest deadly infiltration of Israel with horrible carnage on a wider scale than could ever be imagined, for Hamas and its partners in jihad against Israel to be permanently removed as an ongoing on-again, off-again lethal threat to Jews in Israel. 

 

Palestinian Islamic Jihad is thought to be holding over 30 people as hostages. Hamas has the distinction of holding the greater number as bargaining chips where in past exchanges, a single Israeli hostage could be exchanged for hundreds of Palestinians  held in Israeli prisons for capital crimes. Authorities in Israel have not been publicly forthcoming about the hostages, leaving people searching for their family members turning to social media and local volunteer networks to appeal for information on their whereabouts. 

 

Aerial footage of charred and bullet-riddled cars at the site of Supernova Music Festival in Israel, where at least 260 people were killed by Hamas. Photo: South First Responders via AP

Contact has been made with families of 50 Israeli hostages to bring them updated information of the situation, by the Israel Defense Forces. The search for the hostages is complex; the Gaza Strip encompasses 140 square miles of territory and the Izzedine al-Qassam Brigade has claimed to have 'relocated' Israeli soldiers and officers, keeping them "safeguarded in safe locations and in the resistance's tunnels". The tunnels infiltrate Israel underground and stretch throughout the breadth and depth of the Gaza Strip including beneath its cities.

"A vast underground city with dozens of access points located throughout Gaza", is how Israel describes the tunnels. Those people whom Hamas captured and held within Israel itself as fighting was underway around the border towns were eventually rescued by Israeli troops. Now, Hamas threatens to execute hostages should Israeli forces target Gaza residents. As though Hamas terrorists had been reluctant to slaughter Israelis during their incursion. Hamas issuing instructions to Israel on how to proceed, characterizing its defence as 'aggression'.

In this image from video obtained by the AP, Avinatan Or, second left, and his partner Noa Argamani, not pictured, are seized by Hamas during an attack on an Israeli music festival on Saturday, Oct. 7. Photo by AP Photo

"From this moment on, we announce that every targeting of our people who are safe in their houses, without prior warning, we will regrettably meet with the execution of one of the enemy's civilian hostages that we have. And we will have to broadcast that audio and visually."

"We will not exchange or negotiate on the file of the hostages while under fire, during aggression and battle."

"The hostage situation is a strategic file that has its own clear and known path, and its price will be paid by the occupation, there is no question about it."

Abu Obaida, Hamas spokesperson

The Hamas wildly successful operation from any point of view, theirs or Israel's, has left a dilemma. The terrorists who killed at random as many people as they could surprise, who mutilated and tortured men and women, who murdered entire families, who burned people alive in their homes, who slit throats and killed infants and babies, beheading some, incinerating others, think they have an ace of control in the number of hostages they've taken, abused, raped, threatened. Including infants they've placed in cages.

Israeli authorities are left with extremely difficult decisions to make. Carefully choosing what manner of response will ultimately achieve the purpose of destroying the threat that Palestinian jihadist terror continues to pose to Israel and its population. The safety of hostages has always been uppermost of mind and intention. Rescuing them will be beyond difficult should Hamas distribute them across the Gaza Strip for them to be positioned as a deterrence to Israeli strikes.

The question is, will the decision be forced upon Israel to finally abandon its pledge to first and foremost sacrifice everything in the interests of returning their own to safety in Israel from the hands of its enemies...In the now greater interests of preserving Israel's safety under the threat of an increasingly better-armed terrorist threat becoming increasingly emboldened. Deciding finally, and once and for all, to embark on a no-holds-barred extermination of that threat, allowing the inevitable, the abandonment of the hostages.