Trump's Triumph Over Terror

All Hostages Home, But at What Cost to Israel's Future?

In a stunning diplomatic coup that rewrites the annals of Middle Eastern conflict, President Donald Trump has orchestrated a peace treaty between Israel and Hamas, culminating in the release of all remaining hostages seized during the barbaric October 7, 2023, massacre. On October 13, 2025, in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, Trump stood alongside Arab and European leaders to sign the historic accord, declaring the Gaza war over after two years of unrelenting horror. Hamas, the U.S.-designated terror organization, handed over the final 20 living captives and the remains of deceased ones, ending a nightmare that gripped Israel and the world.

Trump’s relentless mediation—leveraging Qatar, Egypt, and even Turkey—broke the impasse, forcing Hamas to relinquish its most potent bargaining chip without a full Israeli withdrawal. Netanyahu hailed Trump as “the greatest friend Israel has ever had in the White House,” while freed families wept in Tel Aviv’s Hostage Square, where 65,000 Israelis gathered under a clear sky pierced by helicopters ferrying the survivors home.

This achievement is unprecedented in Israel’s history, a testament to Trump’s unyielding deal-making amid Biden-era failures. Yet the hostages’ stories emerging from Gaza’s bowels reveal depths of savagery that no treaty can erase. Many endured 505 to 730 days in Hamas’s subterranean “Metro”—a sprawling 60-foot-deep network of suffocating tunnels, barely three feet wide, carved ceaselessly from dawn to midnight even as war raged above. Deprived of daylight for months, chained in darkness with minimal human contact, they survived on 300 calories a day: stale bread, brackish water, and occasional scraps while captors feasted mockingly. Medical neglect festered wounds from the initial abduction; starvation induced emaciation, partial blindness, and psychological torment. Eli Sharabi, released after 491 days, described barefoot drags into “squalid tombs” where torture—beatings, isolation—broke bodies but not spirits. Women like Naama Levy bore signs of abuse, their chains a grim echo of medieval dungeons. These weren’t soldiers; they were civilians—festival-goers, kibbutz families, the elderly—starved and tortured as human shields in Hamas’s warren of evil.

But this Hamas-Palestinian hostage taking wasn’t an anomaly; it’s doctrine.

Contrast this with past Palestinian hostage crises, a grim ledger of prolonged agony unique in modern warfare. Gilad Shalit, kidnapped in 2006, languished unknown—alive or dead?—for over five years in Hamas isolation until a 2011 swap freed him for 1,027 prisoners, many terrorists who later masterminded October 7. The 1985 Jibril Agreement saw three IDF soldiers held for nearly two years by PFLP-GC, exchanged for 1,150 Palestinians. Nachshon Wachsman, snatched in 1994, was murdered after 20 days during a botched rescue. Unlike civilized nations employing precision strikes or sanctions, Palestinian militants—Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Fatah’s brigades—weaponize abductions as barbaric relics from the Middle Ages.

Read: The Bitter Bargain-Rewarding Hamas Butchers with Israeli Blood

No other conflict sees neighbors tunneling under borders to snatch innocents for extortion, holding them in filth to extort concessions. It’s not tactics; it’s ritualized cruelty, rooted in charters vowing Israel’s erasure.

Israel stands alone as the only nation hemmed by existential foes within a landmass the size of New Jersey, where survival demands eternal vigilance. A post-October 7 Arab World for Research and Development (AWRAD) poll of West Bank and Gaza Arabs—known as “Palestinians” circa 1967—laid bare the moral rot: 74% supported the Hamas atrocities, with 59% “extremely” backing the murders, rapes, and kidnappings of Jews, and 15% “somewhat.” Only 12% opposed, a mere 7% “extremely against” slaughtering children. In the West Bank, under the Palestinian Authority’s “moderate” rule, support soared to 83%, versus 63% in Gaza—where even after weeks of devastation, only 20% recoiled. Is this tactical or moral? The numbers scream endorsement of jihad. Echoes resound in America, where half of Muslims deem Hamas’s civilian slaughter “legitimate,” one in five cheers the massacre, and 67% harbor anti-Israel venom—views imported via unchecked immigration of terror sympathizers steeped in Koranic calls to obliterate Jews and Shariah’s supremacist fury.

Read: The Myth of Gaza’s Innocent Civilians

Watch: Brigitte on Polls Out of American Muslim Community

The big question now: After Trump’s astonishing feat—delivering all hostages at grave cost, swapping non-combatant civilians for thousands of convicted mass murderers through a justice system Hamas mocks—what awaits Phase 2?

Remember, Hamas’s charter thunders: “Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it, just as it obliterated others before it.” As the world blurs and confuses Gaza’s rubble—destroyed to unearth combatants and miles of tunnels enabling endless ambushes—with “ethnic cleansing,” mistaking structural demolition for life’s extermination, the climb steepens. I doubt Hamas will fold, renounce its charter, or abandon its Muslim Brotherhood roots in stealth civilizational jihad, infiltrating Western nations since before Israel’s 1948 rebirth. They’ve waged this blood war against Jews’ ancestral right to a land largely unoccupied by Arabs—Jerusalem, majority-Jewish under Ottoman rule—clinging to caliphate maps where conquered soil stays Islamic eternally, win or lose.

Read: Hamas Dedicated to Israel’s Destruction

Trump, threading Islamist ancients and Russian relics, fights for peace, and I pray his success endures, eyes wide to this enemy’s guiles—deceptive, concealing strength until it strikes anew. May we forge lasting security shielding Israeli neighbors from another October 7 shadow, where cowardly butchers murder helpless babies and the elderly in their failed “Al-Aqsa Flood” bid for Jerusalem. The West must rally in Phase 2 and beyond—peace demands ironclad diligence against history’s oldest hate.

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