Yesterday, the IDF rescued one of the over 200 hostages currently held by Hamas. This small success suggests that invading Gaza, rather than negotiating, may be the most effective way to free the others. Yet the presence of the hostages, who might be murdered by their captors or inadvertently killed by the Israeli assault, still presents a painful conundrum for the Jewish state. Shlomo Brody considers the moral dimensions:

Even if Hamas slowly releases some captives, they will be sure to get something in return, and they are unlikely to make concessions to Israel. . . . Israel has encouraged this hostage-taking by offering [highly] beneficial deals to its adversaries in the past. This must stop, even amid the challenge of facing tearful families.

Urban warfare within Gaza will endanger the captives, in part because Israel will not know if its attacks will land on hidden captivity spots. Some suspect that Hamas will use the captives as human shields. After all, they’ve done it with Palestinians, so we have no reason to believe that they wouldn’t do the same with Israelis, including children.

Yet [the IDF] cannot allow its military response to be defeated by Hamas’s hostage-taking. The security of all Israelis—those held captive and those back home in Israel—depends on allowing the IDF to achieve a decisive victory.

While President Trump has begun his term with a flurry of executive orders, their implementation is another matter. David Wurmser surveys the bureaucratic hurdles facing new presidents, and sets forth what he thinks should be the most important concerns for the White House regarding the Middle East:

The cease-fire agreement between Israel and Hamas may be necessary in order to retrieve whatever live hostages Israel is able to repatriate. Retrieving those hostages has been an Israeli war aim from day one.

But it is a vital American interest . . . to allow Israel to restart the war in Gaza and complete the destruction of Hamas, and also to allow Israel to enforce unilaterally UN Security Council Resolutions 1701 and 1559, which are embedded in the Lebanon cease-fire. If Hamas emerges with a story of victory in any form, not only will Israel face another October 7 soon, and not only will anti-Semitism explode exponentially globally, but cities and towns all over the West will suffer from a newly energized and encouraged global jihadist effort.

After the last hostage Israel can hope to still retrieve has been liberated, Israel will have to finish the war in a way that results in an unambiguous, incontrovertible, complete victory.