How Israel did the impossible – and brought the hostages home

On 25 October 2023, speaking as Israel prepared to expand its ground campaign in Gaza, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu publicly and unambiguously set out Israel’s two central war aims: the destruction of Hamas and the return of all the hostages the Palestinians had taken into Gaza. It was the first time he set out the two goals together in such a clear, paired manner, and that phrasing would go on to define the government’s strategic language for the duration of the war.

Netanyahu presented the goals not as alternatives or competing priorities, but as parallel and non-negotiable commitments. Israel would prosecute a full-scale military campaign to eliminate Hamas while binding itself to the recovery of every single captive. The formulation hardened into a slogan and a promise, repeated relentlessly in speeches, briefings and official communications.

Since then, Netanyahu has been attacked from every direction for failing to deliver on either pledge. Critics accused him of sacrificing the hostages for military ambition, then of sacrificing military momentum for diplomacy, then of achieving neither. But even his opponents must now admit that he has delivered on one of those promises.

The return of the body of Staff Sergeant Ran Gvili, recovered in a complex operation deep inside Gaza, marked the end of Israel’s hostage chapter in this war. In the Knesset, Netanyahu opened with the traditional Jewish blessing of thanksgiving. The moment carried a weight that went beyond politics or military accounting. For months, the country had lived with a small yellow ribbon pinned to jackets, bags, uniforms, a quiet, stubborn signal that the promise still stood. With the mission completed, Netanyahu showed the time had come to remove it.

The operation itself was grim and exacting. Acting on accumulated intelligence, Israeli forces entered a cemetery in the Shuja’iyya–Daraj Tuffah area, operating along the Yellow Line in Gaza. Specialised search teams worked alongside engineers, dental experts, and rabbinical figures. Body after body was exhumed and examined. Ran Gvili was identified through dental records. Having completed a task few armies would even contemplate, the soldiers involved sang the Israeli national anthem, ‘Hatikvah’ (The Hope), as they stood in Gaza and paid their respects to Ran’s body, shrouded in their national flag.

I know of no other military that would go to such lengths, at such cost and risk, to recover the body of a single fallen soldier in the midst of an ongoing war. Some argue that this is folly, that risking living soldiers to retrieve a corpse is irrational or reckless. But the Israel Defense Forces are not a professional caste detached from society. They are drawn from it. They are parents, siblings, business owners, artists, scientists, doctors, bus drivers, janitors. Since 7 October, many have served for hundreds of days, suspending ordinary lives to meet an extraordinary demand.

An army that relies on its population relies on this kind of covenant. The promise is not abstract. It is practical and existential: no one is left behind, dead or alive. To break that promise is to  risk fracturing the social contract.

Until the final hours, it appeared that the reopening of the Rafah crossing between Gaza and Egypt would proceed regardless of whether the remains of the last hostage had been found. Announced last week at Davos, the reopening is expected to go ahead imminently. To leave behind a single dead hostage might have been dismissed as an unfortunate but unavoidable detail, insufficient to derail a broader regional plan. Yet, with time running out, Israel applied every capability at its disposal. Intelligence was acted upon. Forces moved. The body was located, exhumed, and identified.

If few expected Netanyahu to succeed in bringing home all those taken on 7 October, fewer still expect him to fulfil the second half of his pledge: the total demilitarisation and elimination of Hamas as a fighting force. And yet that is now his renewed promise.

Israel currently controls roughly 58 per cent of the Gaza Strip. As Trump presses forward with his plan to rebuild the territory and maybe one day hand it back to Palestinians under some future form of self-rule, Netanyahu faces a different kind of pressure. He will need to demonstrate that Israel was not overruled, that reconstruction does not become rearmament by another name. That means dismantling Hamas’s remaining military capacity, reclaiming 60,000 Kalashnikovs he has cited, destroying tunnel networks and production facilities, and preventing the reconstitution of armed rule.

To outside observers, these goals sound impossible. But bringing back all the hostages was dismissed as impossible, too. Israel did it. These promises may sound arbitrary, idealistic, even performative, but to Israel, nothing is too dramatic. It is a country whose history has read like a thriller from its earliest days, whose survival has defied odds at every turn. A people whose annihilation has been attempted repeatedly by armies larger, better armed, and more numerous, often backed by far broader coalitions.

It is tempting to reach for biblical or spiritual explanations. Perhaps they have their place. Not everyone’s taste runs in that direction. What can be said, without mysticism, is that human beings united by purpose, driven by pain and fury, and threatened by brutality can achieve things that appear impossible from a distance.

Anyone in doubt can look at a map and trace a finger to that narrow sliver of land so many have sought to erase. It is still there. It does not get everything right. It argues, stumbles, fractures. Yet it persists, and it fights to defend its existence. Yesterday, it delivered on one impossible promise. The second now waits.

This is where the American role becomes decisive, and often misunderstood. The US initiative on Gaza should not be read as a naïve development plan or a humanitarian fantasy. Its headline promises of employment, reconstruction and futuristic redevelopment are not about realism. They are about framing.

Washington has placed a maximal, almost utopian offer on the table precisely because it expects it to fail. The point is to force a binary choice. Either Gaza, and Palestinians more generally, move decisively away from armed jihadist governance, towards demilitarisation and external oversight, or they absorb the consequences of continued war and isolation. The message is blunt: everything is being offered. Rejection transfers responsibility.

This strategy buys time. Even a temporary pause delays large-scale fighting, reduces Israeli casualties, and allows further consolidation of the diplomatic case against Hamas. It exposes bad faith. It drains sympathy. It reframes the conflict as one of Palestinian political choice rather than Israeli obstruction. Or so the US may hope.

Governance proposals emerging from Washington reflect this pragmatism. There is no search for a morally pure Palestinian leadership. Any figure with local standing will carry factional history. The aim is a technocratic authority operationally reliant on external backing, financially constrained, and removable if it drifts towards Hamas. Disarmament is the price of reconstruction. According to the agreements signed at least, there is no flexibility on that point. Israel will wish to hold the US to that promise.

Demilitarisation remains the true red line. If Hamas refuses, the strategy should shift. Opening the border with Egypt functions as a pressure valve: population movement reduces Hamas’s ability to embed itself behind civilians. Israel gains greater freedom of action, with fewer civilian entanglements and clearer international justification.

More broadly, Gaza itself is not the central strategic theatre. Iran remains the core concern, with Turkey hovering uneasily on the edge of hostility and opportunism. The American military posture signals as much to Tehran as to Gaza. That many European states have chosen to stand on the sidelines and scoff at President Trump’s plans, even as atrocities unfold elsewhere in the region, only underscores how marginal they have become.

What is clear is this: Israel has delivered on one impossible promise. The second is now being tested, under harsher conditions, with fewer illusions. Whether demilitarisation can be achieved will determine not only Gaza’s future, but the credibility of every promise made since October.

History offers no guarantees. It rarely does. But it does record moments when nations, bound by pain, pressure, and purpose, achieved what seemed implausible. Israel has reached such a moment again. What follows will not be symbolic. It will be decisive.