The New Yorker:

Never before has Israel sought to rescue so many hostages from a territory where it is also waging an unbridled aerial war.

By Steve Coll 

The Hostages and Missing Families Forum, an umbrella volunteer group formed by relatives, friends, and experts soon after the October 7th attack in Israel, maintains a ticking clock on its Web site, to count the days, hours, and seconds since Hamas and allied militants seized what the Israeli military believes to be more than two hundred and thirty Israeli and international hostages, who are presumably being held in Gaza. The more the clock ticks, the more urgent are the pleas from the hostages’ families and their allies that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his war cabinet prioritize the hostages’ safe return. Over the weekend, protesters—including many family members—camped outside the defense ministry headquarters in Tel Aviv. On Saturday, Netanyahu met with family members, and on Sunday, the defense minister, Yoav Gallant, held his first official consultation with hostage relatives since the crisis began more than three weeks ago. “We are not waiting any longer,” Malki Shem-Tov, a protester whose son Omer was seized on October 7th, said, according to the Associated Press. “We want you, the Cabinet, the government, to imagine that these are your children.”

That pleading captured the pain and the moral complexity that often permeates hostage crises. Israel, tragically, has had experience with many such cases in Gaza and Lebanon, as well as with international hostage crises arising out of hijackings and other terrorist attacks, such as the seizure and killing of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympics, in Munich. At times, Israel has negotiated lopsided prisoner exchanges to free its captives. In 2006, Hamas kidnapped Gilad Shalit, an Israeli soldier, and held him in Gaza; five years later, the militant group freed him in exchange for more than a thousand Palestinian prisoners who had been held by Israel. Yet none of these past cases can offer easy guidance for how to handle the unprecedented mass kidnapping of October 7th. Never before has Israel sought to rescue so many hostages from a territory where it is also waging an unbridled aerial war that has already claimed thousands of civilian lives—a campaign that Israel is now apparently escalating with a ground invasion.

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