Israel’s central covenant with Jews is in peril like never before
From ‘There he is’ to ‘Where are they?’
Relatives of Israeli hostages and their supporters take part in an anti-government protest near Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Jerusalem residence calling for action to secure the release of hostages held by Palestinian militants in Gaza since Oct. 7, 2023. Photo by Ahmad Gharabli/AFP/Getty Images
Senior Columnist Rob Eshman September 17, 2025
Somewhere amid the rubble of Gaza City, amid the bodies of dead Palestinians and the screams of survivors, we know there are Israeli hostages whose lives, at this point, hang by a thread.
I weep for the country that would let them die.
On the kibbutzim in the nearby Gaza envelope — the site of the vicious Oct. 7 Hamas attack that precipitated the current war — residents can feel their own homes shake when the Israeli bombs drop.
Imagine what the Israeli hostages in Gaza City, now under a fresh ground assault, feel.
“We hear the bombings on our children and cannot sit at home,” Einav Zangauker, whose son Matan is still among the hostages, wrote on X. “We are fighting for life, for the fallen, for an entire country.”
“For an entire country” does not at all seem like a hyperbole. If Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s push into Gaza consigns the remaining hostages to their deaths — if that’s the trade-off he’s made — Israel will indeed become a different country, one that has broken its covenant with the people it was created to save.
This is only partly about Jewish religious values. Jewish text and tradition stresses the importance of redeeming hostages, true. But as with so many absolutes in Jewish law, there are exceptions and arguments.
What is inarguable is that the modern Jewish state was founded as a refuge for a people who had been persecuted, hounded and murdered for millennia. If they protected the state, the thinking went, the state would protect them.
Now, Netanyahu and his cabinet of messianists are undercutting that promise. The goals of this war — to free the hostages and destroy Hamas — were always going to be mutually exclusive. But most Jews believed that when the choice became stark, Israel’s leaders would choose the hostages, whose faces have become as familiar as those of family.
Promises made, promises broken.
“I cannot breathe watching the fighting inside Gaza City,” former hostage Noa Argamani posted on X. “As a former hostage, I know exactly what these moments feel like. The booming blasts, the gunfire, the walls shaking, the helplessness and despair that take over.”
Despite some military opposition, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu decided to send the Israel Defense Forces into Gaza City to destroy, he said, the last stronghold of Hamas.
A poll taken just before the incursion found that 49% of Israelis opposed continuing the war, with 42% of Israelis in favor continuing it. Two-thirds of the respondents said they would prefer a ceasefire and negotiations.
Now, the images of death and destruction befalling the civilian Palestinians who did not or could not evacuate are awful enough. Add to that the uncertainty of whether the 20 hostages believed to still be alive will survive the onslaught, and it’s unbearable.
Argamani’s boyfriend, Avinatan Or — captured with her at the Nova music festival on Oct. 7 — is still believed to be among them.
“I fear deeply for Avinatan’s life,” she wrote. “I fear for the lives of all the hostages. I saw my friend die before my eyes in captivity, and I cannot accept that it should happen to anyone else, ever again.”
It may be, as an Israeli friend told me, that Netanyahu knows what he is doing, and the IDF has good intelligence on the hostages. After all, he reminded me, there was widespread opposition to Israel’s invasion of Rafah in spring 2024, but the Rafah attack led to the killing of Oct. 7 mastermind Yahya Sinwar. And if Israel had agreed to a ceasefire before Rafah, its subsequent successful attacks against Hezbollah and Iran might never have happened.
“What if we had stopped before Rafah?” my friend asked.
Then again: Hamas executed six hostages in the midst of the Israel’s Rafah invasion.
And there are good reasons to believe Gaza City is different. Numerous former military and political officials have argued that Hamas no longer poses an existential threat. Even current IDF Chief of Staff Eyal Zamir opposed the move.
“This is a decision that will cost the lives of our best sons and sacrifice the hostages — this time permanently to their death,” former IDF Chief of Staff Gadi Eisenkot said at a security cabinet meeting before the invasion. More than 500,000 Israelis took to the streets to protest it. On Tuesday, after the ground operation began, families of hostages and hundreds of their supporters marched outside Netanyahu’s Jerusalem residence to call for an end to the military campaign.
I know why they did, because I witnessed the power of Israel’s covenant to protect each and every Jew unfold firsthand on Oct. 18, 2011 — in, of all places, the ballroom of the Beverly Hilton Hotel in Beverly Hills.
Some 350 people packed together to watch a live broadcast, on a giant screen, of the release of Gilad Shalit, the 25-year-old IDF soldier kidnapped by Hamas and held for five years.
It was a rare moment of Jewish unity. Left, right, Orthodox, secular: All of us stood shoulder to shoulder, holding our collective breath as Shalit’s Hamas captors released the pale, fragile young man into the hands of Egyptian mediators.
“There he is,” said David Siegel, then consul general of Israel in Los Angeles.
The crowd erupted in cheers — not just for Shalit’s freedom, but for the idea that a place existed on earth that would move heaven and earth for any one of us. The covenant held.
Many Israelis opposed the deal Israel made with Ahmed Jabari, the Hamas leader who orchestrated Shalit’s kidnapping, exchanging Shalit for 1,027 Palestinian prisoners, many of whom were subsequently involved in bloody terror attacks — including Sinwar, who would go on to plan Oct. 7.
Now, in Gaza City, that opposition has found a belated fulfillment. There are serious concerns that the few hostages who remain alive will be killed in this operation. On Sept. 5, Hamas released a video recording of hostage Guy Gilboa Dalal saying if the attack on Gaza City goes forward, “we’ll die here.” Maybe it’s a cruel Hamas bluff. Or maybe when your enemies say they mean to kill you, you should believe them.
The Israeli government doesn’t seem to care, putting the goal of eradicating an already-decimated Hamas over those precious lives. As traumatized residents flee, and buildings explode and collapse above the tunnels where the terrified hostages may be kept, it seems that Israel’s foundational promise to protect her own is under attack, too.
Netanyahu’s calculation is that extirpating Hamas’ military remnant outweighs the potential loss of hostage lives. At this moment we can only hope and pray it doesn’t come to that.
But if it does, we will have the future of Israel to add to our prayers.
