US President Donald Trump's plan to end the war in Gaza includes several components that represent significant, even unprecedented, gains for Israel. Yet one deeply troubling issue -- the normalization of the abduction of Israelis -- has been entirely absent from discussions about Israel's achievements in the war and the debates surrounding the day after.
When it comes to this issue, the war's conclusion offers little comfort. The bottom line is that, from the perspective of the Gazan Islamist terrorists, the abduction and holding of Israeli civilians as hostages in Gaza has paid off. In fact, the terrorists managed to exploit the hostages in three distinct ways.
First, they used them and the families of some hostages as a means of pressuring Israeli society and its leaders, in an effort to force Israel to end the war without achieving the total military destruction of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad. That attempt was at least partly successful. Many in Israeli society adopted the terrorists' narrative that Israel must give in to their strategic demands in order to bring the hostages home alive.
Second, the hostages served as human shields for the terrorists and their military assets. That too worked for them, at least partially. The Israel Defense Forces avoided operating in areas of the Gaza Strip where, according to intelligence estimates, the hostages were being held.
Third, the release of hostages through various deals yielded precisely what the terrorists wanted. In the initial exchanges -- when kidnapped minors, women, the elderly, and the wounded were freed from Gaza's underground dungeons -- the perpetrators achieved a host of gains: a pause in fighting that they used to regroup, humanitarian supplies that strengthened their control, and, of course, the release of terrorists from Israeli prisons. In the current deal, they secured another major prize: about 2,000 terrorists, including some of the most heinous murderers who deserve to be sent to hell, were set free.
Ultimately, the hostages once again proved to be the terrorists' greatest asset, They are more valuable than rockets, missiles, or tunnels. Even after Israel defeated Hamas and its allies both above and below ground in Gaza, it was still compelled to accept parts of their conditions in order to secure the hostages' release.
Even worse, the abduction of Israeli civilians has become fully normalized. Despite being a moral outrage and a flagrant violation of the laws of war, no one in the global community is calling for the kidnappers to be punished, nor has anyone sought to deny them the fruits of their horrific crime. The world's hypocrisy is not new, but this time it has reached unprecedented levels.
To the credit of Israel's leadership, it did not capitulate and refused to yield to all of the kidnappers' demands. Populist calls to give Hamas everything it wanted and to release the hostages "at any cost" were rebuffed by the prime minister. Israel did not repeat the grave mistake of the Gilad Schalit deal and significantly improved the ratio of terrorists released per hostage. Still, the recommendations of the Shamgar Commission on handling abductions were never fully implemented, and therefore Israel has yet to prove to its enemies that kidnapping Israeli civilians does not pay.