While trouble brews in the north, fighting has continued in the area around al-Shifa hospital in central Gaza, where large supplies of weapons were hidden in the maternity ward and where numerous Hamas operatives gathered to renew combat against the IDF. Israeli forces have killed dozens of terrorists there, including some high-ranking officers; they have managed to arrest hundreds more. Eran Lerman examines the significance of the fact that these fighters are choosing surrender over martyrdom:

Achieving the surrender of large numbers of enemy fighters is advantageous, first of all, in terms of incurring fewer casualties and requiring less military effort than a “fight to the finish.” It has also been proven to be of immense value in obtaining vital intelligence, such as the location of tunnels and their entrances. Another operational consideration has to do with improving Israel’s leverage in the negotiations for the hostages’ release.

Yet in addition, the surrender of Hamas’s armed men is also of long-term value at the level of grand strategy. For decades, Islamist totalitarian terrorist groups, from Hizballah and Hamas to al-Qaeda and Islamic State, have cultivated the legend that the muqawwamah (“resistance”), rooted in a version of religious faith, will stand and fight to the last—unlike the . . . flight and surrender that marked the defeat of secular Arab nationalism, above all in the war of 1967.

Thus not only do mass arrests suggest flagging morale, but they also send “a message both to the Gazans themselves, whose life Hamas was willing to sacrifice unhesitatingly and in great numbers, and to much wider circles in the Arab and Muslim world,” a message that the myth of resistance is no more than a myth.

Robert Satloff has some harsh words for the U.S. government in this regard, words I take especially seriously because Satloff is someone inclined to political moderation. Why, he asks, have American diplomats failed to achieve anything in their endless rounds of talks in Doha and Cairo? Because

there is simply not enough pressure on Hamas to change course, accept a deal, and release the remaining October 7 hostages, stuck in nightmarish captivity. . . . In this environment, why should Hamas change course?

Publicly, the U.S. should bite the bullet and urge Israel to complete the main battle operations in Gaza—i.e., the Rafah operation—as swiftly and efficiently as possible. We should be assertively assisting with the humanitarian side of this.

Satloff had more to say about the hostages, especially the five American ones, in a speech he gave recently:

I am ashamed—ashamed of how we have allowed the story of the hostages to get lost in the noise of the war that followed their capture; ashamed of how we have permitted their release to be a bargaining chip in some larger political negotiation; ashamed of how we have failed to give them the respect and dignity and our wholehearted demand for Red Cross access and care and medicine that is our normal, usual demand for hostages.

If they were taken by Boko Haram, everyone would know their name. If they were taken by the Taliban, everyone would tie a yellow ribbon around a tree for them. If they were taken by Islamic State, kids would learn about them in school.

It is repugnant to see their freedom as just one item on the bargaining table with Hamas, as though they were chattel. These are Americans—and they deserve to be backed by the full faith and credit of the United States.