Returning the Israeli hostages is not nearly enough.

Returning the Israeli hostages without destroying Hamas is like treating cancer with painkillers.

photo: Nova Exhibition/Facebook

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Roei Shalev survived on October 7, 2023.

He survived being shot in the back at the Nova music festival, survived watching terrorists kill his partner Mapal Adam and his close friend Hili Solomon, survived the days and months afterward when grief and shock folded in on themselves and never quite unwrapped.

Two weeks after the massacre his mother, Raffaela, also took her own life. Two years later, in a farewell post that read like the transcript of a wound that could not close, Shalev wrote that he was “burning” and “already dead” on the inside. This past Friday, he was found in a burning car on a highway exit in Israel. He committed suicide.

His death, one more in a pattern of survivors tormented beyond the moment of the attack, was met with the same helplessness that has shadowed this war: sorrow, organized aid, speeches, condolences, headlines, and then the knowledge that none of that stitches up the people whose lives were shattered in ways that do not obey anniversaries or diplomatic milestones.

Every returned hostage matters. Each freed person is a child of someone, a parent, a friend, a life halted and then, one hopes, resumed. Their release is a moral imperative, a human triumph in the face of barbarity.

But to stop at the exchange table, to treat the returning of hostages as the end of the ledger, is to mistake one act of mercy for the whole duty of justice and prevention. The image of a family reunited is necessary and vital; it is not sufficient. Heroic though rescue and negotiation may be, they cannot undo the strategic fact that the tactics which produced those hostages — indiscriminate slaughter, sexual violence, kidnapping, the deliberate weaponization of civilians — remain a template if not obliterated.

The question a grieving country must ask is blunt: Will the civilized world take measures that make it impossible for Hamas to ever again be a model for terror, or will the horror be preserved in memory only, a precedent rather than a warning?

For survivors like Nova festival attendees, the violence did not end when they walked out of the desert, or when a prisoner was brought home. PTSD does not respect ceasefires. The country has watched a cascade of mental-health crises, with survivors repeatedly and publicly describing unrelenting trauma, and with accounts of suicides and near-suicides among the young people who saw what happened there.

Members of civil society and clinicians have warned for months that this is a national mental-health emergency that requires continuous resourcing: long-term professional care, stable funding, outreach that finds people who can’t ask for help, and a social consensus that the living wounds need more than a press conference. To celebrate a hostage’s return while letting the structures that permit devastation remain intact is to celebrate a rescue and ignore a recurrence.

There is a security dimension and a moral-political dimension to making sure “never again” does not become a rhetorical echo. Security demands dismantling the operational capacity of the group that perpetrated the slaughter. That means more than symbolic strikes or ephemeral sanctions; it means sustained international cooperation that removes the command-and-control, the logistics, the safe havens, the financing, and the political cover that allow terror groups to project force and to recruit. It means denying them the prestige that comes from successful, attention-grabbing atrocities.

If Hamas’ tactics are left unpunished in meaningful ways, then those tactics — the mass massacre, the rout of civilian protections, the spectacle of kidnapping and atrocity streamed as propaganda — will be taught to other groups as a playbook for impact and notoriety. The international community cannot be neutral about the mechanics of evil without becoming an unwitting teacher. This is not vengeance for vengeance’s sake; it is prevention.

From the late 1960s to the early 1980s, aircraft hijackings involving Palestinian militant groups were a notable tactic used in the context of the Arab-Israeli conflict. In September 1970, members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine hijacked four airliners bound for New York City and one for London. Three aircraft were forced to land at Dawson’s Field, a remote desert airstrip near Zarqa, Jordan, formerly Royal Air Force Station Zarqa, which then became the “Revolutionary Airport” of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.

On June 27, 1976, an Air France flight departed from Tel Aviv, carrying 246 mainly Jewish and Israeli passengers and a crew of 12. The plane flew to Athens, where it picked up an additional 58 passengers, including four hijackers. Just after takeoff, the flight was hijacked by two Palestinians from the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, ending in the dramatic Israeli rescue at Entebbe. The world applauded Israel’s courage, but it did not punish the perpetrators, their sponsors, or the ideology behind them.

That was the beginning of the problem. The Palestinians’ use of civilian airliners as political weapons went largely unpunished and even glamorized in some corners of the world. Hijackings became the fashionable face of “resistance.” What began as a Palestinian tactic became an international language of terror — copied by revolutionaries, Islamists, and anti-Western extremists everywhere.

The lesson was clear to those watching: Terrorism works. The hijackers didn’t need to win wars; they just needed to hijack the world’s fear. That logic, perfected by Palestinian terror groups, metastasized over decades until September 11, 2001, when Al-Qaeda took the same playbook and turned airplanes into missiles. The Palestinian hijackings of the 1970s were not just crimes against Israelis or Jews; they were the prototype for global terror. The world’s failure to condemn and dismantle that culture of violence allowed the same psychological weapon to evolve.

If the deliberate targeting of civilians is rewarded by influence or by amplification, it will be imitated. If it is exposed, isolated, and erased as an instrument of policy, it can be made unusable as a model. The choice is not abstract. It is measured in dead children, in the lives that spiral into chronic despair, in communities that never recover.

That moral-political posture requires courage from democratic states because it will force uncomfortable questions about alliances, enforcement, and the limits of realpolitik. It will demand coordinated pressure on states and non-state actors that enable terror, such as closing financial pipelines, policing arms transfers, cracking down on networks of support, and refusing diplomatic imprimaturs that grant legitimacy.

It will also mean rebuilding the intelligence and defense architectures that prevent similar infiltrations: better early-warning systems, more robust defense of soft targets, rapid-reaction capabilities that are not purely reactive, and intelligence-sharing that treats mass-casualty scenarios as something the international system must anticipate and forestall. These are technical measures; they are not incompatible with moral clarity.

In fact, they are an expression of it. To provide care and to prosecute crimes, to welcome hostages home and to also remove the conditions that produced those hostages, are complementary obligations: One heals the individual, the other protects the many.

The demand that Hamas be made an example of, that its model be invalidated, often sounds like a call for punitive overreach. That is a misread. Making a group an example to future terrorists does not require cruelty or the erosion of the rule of law; it requires the meticulous application of law, of international cooperation, and of deterrent force that is both proportionate and effective. It requires a legal architecture that holds leaders and logisticians to account, that chokes off material support, that severs the media stage on which their crimes are glorified.

The aim is not to replicate brutality, but to make brutality an instrument that fails strategically. A robust, rights-respecting international response that destroys the business model of terror is not only ethical; it is strategic. It saves lives.

There is an important domestic piece of the work, too. A nation that sees its citizens returned home must not mistake the hostage’s freed body for a healed society. The grief that follows a massacre, and the slow attrition of hope that can culminate in a man burning himself on a highway, are smoking signs of structural neglect.

Long-term funding for mental-health services must be nonpolitical and noncontingent; trauma-informed care must be woven into schools, hospitals, and community centers; social safety nets must be stabilized for families whose breadwinners and anchors were taken or destroyed; memorialization must be paired with active, living support systems that track outcomes and intervene early. Public rhetoric matters: to survivors, phrases like “we will not let them win” ring hollow if the state cannot keep its promises to care for the living. To the world, rhetoric alone is a poor substitute for the durable, tangible investments that reduce suffering and prevent further casualties of war and terror.

Finally, consider the moral calculus for the free world. Returning hostages is an explicit ethical obligation; it is a restitution that cannot be delayed and must be carried out when possible.

But, if the international community allows the apparatus that created the hostages to remain intact, it will have performed a limited justice: one that restores a person to family but leaves the mechanism of harm untouched. That limited justice will then be studied by would-be killers as a viable channel to publicity, bargaining power, and effect. The alternative is to combine the tactical, emotional act of release with a strategy that eliminates the strategic utility of atrocity. This means justice in the fullest sense: rescue for the individual and incapacitation for the model of terror.

Roei Shalev’s life story, and the lives of others like him, demand that we think not only in terms of single acts of rescue but of long arcs of protection. We must ask ourselves whether our response honors the depth of their suffering. Will we invest in healing and structural prevention, or will we applaud hostage returns and then let the currents that produced them run on?

Returning the hostages is a necessary chapter in the moral ledger; it is not the entire book. To keep writing that book as if the last page is the only page is to consign future generations to reread tragedies we might have finally prevented.

If the international community is serious about preserving humanity, about ensuring that barbaric tactics cannot be used as lessons for others, then it must turn the moral urgency that frees hostages into lasting policies that make the criminal method impossible to replicate.

Anything less is a partial mercy; a full duty remains.

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