"Can you handle this?" Benjamin Netanyahu asked Gal Hirsch. The date was the morning of October 8, 2023. Hirsch had just recovered from cancer.
"This" was the most difficult mission ever assigned in public service: bringing home an unprecedented number of hostages and missing persons—numbers that were not yet known at the time. In fact, Hirsch did not state the number publicly until the end of November, so as not to give Hamas the opportunity to claim that hostages were merely "missing."
"By the evening of October 8, I realized we were missing 3,200 people. In the second week, 1,060. Later, 400," Hirsch says.
Yahya Sinwar, it now turns out, planned to keep the hostages as an asset that would yield returns for ten years—yes, ten years of negotiations.
"We classified the hostages as Ron Arads—those feared unlikely to be found; Wachsmans—hostages in known locations but with low chances of rescue; Regevs and Goldwassers—fallen soldiers; or Shalits—those who would be returned in a deal."
The ethos of rescue operations collided, as it so often has in the past, with reality. There was an inconceivable gap between the depth of intelligence and the slim chances of extraction. "There were cases where one of our units was right outside the door. But we knew we wouldn't get the crucial seconds needed for rescue, so we gave up."
The war blurred the categories. "There has never been, in the modern era, an event where a maneuvering army with six divisions was operating while hundreds of hostages were held across dozens of locations on the battlefield. When the maneuver began on October 26, we worked out of an improvised office they set up for us in one of the WeWork spaces, and families came running to us, crying, 'What are you doing to them?' We always insisted on maintaining the order: intelligence and maneuver—without giving up on either."
Contact with the Qataris was established shortly beforehand. Hirsch called the mobile phone of a senior Qatari official who offered his country's mediation services. "How do I know you can deliver the goods?" Hirsch asked. "Tell me what you need," the Qatari replied. "Get me hostages," Hirsch said.
The Qatari went south into Gaza to supervise the pilot release. He waited in the office of the brigade commander—the late captive Asaf Hamami, a former subordinate of Hirsch. The next day, Judith and Natalie Raanan were released. After that, hostages Yocheved Lifshitz and Nurit Cooper arrived via Egypt. Qatar assumed the role of mediator.
"What killed me," Hirsch says, "was the enormous gap between what I saw in the intelligence and in the negotiating rooms. Inside, they demanded total surrender; outside, they broadcast that Israel was the obstructionist. The peak was during Ramadan: Sinwar planned an 'Al-Aqsa Flood 2,' but we were accused of sabotaging a deal by refusing a ceasefire during the fast."
On Thursday morning, the headquarters was officially shut down. Hirsch will remain with details he will carry, like his colleagues, for the rest of his life. By virtue of their roles, they saw every video, watched every horror, heard every testimony: "People have died in my hands before. I've killed and nearly been killed, but I've never seen anything so genocidal, so biblical."
By our own hand
Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff clearly noticed the skeptical looks around them in the Prime Minister's Office—looks that said: how naïve are you if you think Hamas will dismantle itself without the IDF laying a hand on it.
"I was born at night," Kushner told them, "but not last night."
The Americans made it clear they had not forgotten who Hamas is, or who the Gazans are. We remember very well, they said, that not a single person called the hotline the IDF opened for turning in hostages. Even in Nazi Germany there were Righteous Among the Nations—and that was without the promise of five million dollars.
The gaps between the U.S. and Israel regarding Gaza are larger than they were—but smaller than reported. The main dispute concerns reconstruction. The White House clarified that Gaza's reconstruction will not begin until a process of demilitarization starts—meaning that construction materials would be allowed in once demilitarization begins, long before it is completed. Israel is unwilling to accept this, having learned the bitter lesson that cement and iron go first to the tunnels.
The issue of Israeli withdrawal has also not been resolved: will it be gradual, tied to progress in demilitarization, or will there be no withdrawal at all until demilitarization is complete? Netanyahu opposes moving the border as long as weapons remain in the Strip—or, as it's said in Hebrew: forever.
"Still, the most likely outcome is that Hamas's destruction will ultimately be carried out by IDF soldiers," an American official said. "But what's the harm if we begin demilitarization peacefully? Clearly Hamas will drag its feet, and clearly it will want to keep weapons—but what if only 10,000 Kalashnikovs are handed over and only fifty tunnels are destroyed without a fight? How does that hurt? Neither we nor you are in a rush. It would simply save the IDF some work."
There will not be a war like the one that reached its symbolic end this week, the Americans believe—both because the world will not allow it, and because the time will be used to build temporary housing on the Israeli side, to which a significant population will relocate, so fighting will not take place in dense concentrations. It would be faster fighting, free of hostage constraints, and with minimal harm to noncombatants where possible.
"The world is not on your side," the Kushner–Witkoff duo told Netanyahu, "but it is definitely against Hamas. Use that."
What will we do with the next hostage?
Eight hundred and forty-three days of captivity brought scenes of horror previously unimaginable: extracting bodies from ice-cream freezers, digging through cemeteries in search of bones. In the second week, it was even considered granting all hostages American citizenship after Hamas hinted it would release foreign nationals first.
But one scene was spared: had the Shamgar Commission report been legislated—the one that set extremely rigid rules for negotiations with kidnappers—would a stunned Israeli society have allowed it to stand? Or, under Hamas pressure, would the Knesset have convened and repealed the law at Sinwar's demand?
The commission recommended severing all contact between hostage families ("the captive") and decision-makers to prevent undue pressure—a decree the children of winter 2023 would not have endured. It demanded preventing publication of negotiation details—an innocence that now provokes bitter laughter. And it also reached an interesting conclusion, long before October 7: the state has a greater obligation to return a captured soldier than a civilian.
Did it envision a scenario of a mother abducted with her two soft, red-haired children?
Four prime ministers have served since the Shamgar Commission was established—or by its unofficial name: the commission to end extortion by kidnappers of Israelis. Some prime ministers drifted to the far left, some forged alliances with the radical right, but all shared one thing: none adopted the report. Even before the hostage crisis, there was a prime ministerial principle at work—people addicted to influence and power do not like tying their own hands. As Ephraim Kishon once said: I do not make a habit of undermining myself.
But the main reason the law was never passed is that, like the draft law, culture cannot be changed through legislation. A state's or a sector's ethos—right or wrong—will wash over any Knesset or government decision. Even Itamar Ben-Gvir deceives himself when he advances mandatory death penalties. What would Israel look like if such a law were repealed at the demand of the next terror organization?
Israel, as a state, must now clean up after itself and repair the immense damage caused by the hostage-terror arena. One can bask in what happened at Hostages Square and say, "We brought them back." Or one can look reality straight in the eye and see the terrible price that was paid.
Even the late President Shamgar focused only on the number of terrorists released per Israeli. He never imagined a day when the enemy would demand strategic prices in return—such as withdrawals or an end to the war.
Therefore, the required tool must combine broad national consensus and be less rigid than the Shamgar Commission but tougher than current Israeli policy. Perhaps a charter of basic principles signed by most party leaders, perhaps a public commission. As Alterman once suggested:
"To place my hand in the craftsman's guiding hand,
and hear him say, as I approach the task in fervor:
'Child, hold the tool firmly—but gently.'"
