The last surviving October 7th hostages are home. Earlier this month, 738 days after they were kidnapped from their homes, military bases, and a music festival in southern Israel, the 20 surviving hostages of the Hamas-led attack were released into Red Cross custody and returned to their loved ones.
As I wrote in the immediate aftermath of the Oct. 7, 2023, attack, the mass kidnapping was unprecedented in several respects. Hamas and its allies took an astounding number of diverse and vulnerable captives. In total, 251 hostages were held in tunnels and homes throughout Gaza.
And yet, as this singular hostage crisis came to an end, its resolution followed a remarkably familiar pattern of most hostage recovery. Here are several broad takeaways about this pervasive form of violence.
1. Concessions – not rescue missions – bring captives home
The October 2025 ceasefire provides a vivid reminder that the most common and reliable way to recover hostages is through concessions. Indeed, prisoner exchanges have freed nearly every hostage in the past two years.
In November 2023, Hamas exchanged 81 Israeli hostages for 240 Palestinian detainees. In January 2025, they traded another 30 hostages for more than 1,000 Palestinians. The most recent exchange included the final 20 surviving hostages from the October 7th attack, freed in exchange for nearly 2,000 Palestinian prisoners. In total, Israel released more than 3,200 Palestinian political prisoners and detainees in exchange for sending 155 Israeli hostages home.
These exchanges follow global patterns. Though hostage-taking statistics are underreported, the existing data are clear on two points. First, most hostages survive captivity. And second, most hostages are freed in exchange for concessions like prisoner swaps and ransom payments.
Resolution via concessions goes against popular notions of hostage release. Many governments tout their “no concessions” policies, claiming that they won’t give in to kidnappers’ demands. And Hollywood likes to portray hostage crises resolved by dramatic, cinematic rescues. Together, these myths imply that target governments will refuse kidnappers’ demands, instead relying on military rescue missions. In fact, democracies regularly make significant concessions to bring their citizens home.
2. Military rescues are rare – and seldom succeed
In reality, military rescue missions are exceedingly difficult and rare – and they seldom succeed. Rescues represent the time in captivity when hostages are most likely to die. These missions require robust, up-to-the-minute intelligence. Militaries only pursue rescue missions when they can minimize the risk to their own soldiers and risk to the hostage. As such, governments pursue rescue far less often than popular portrayals would have us expect.
The fate of the October 7th hostages illustrates these dynamics clearly. During the past two years of war in Gaza, the Israeli government recovered 155 hostages by making concessions. Over the same time period, the Israeli Defense Forces rescued only eight hostages – and inadvertently killed at least six hostages. As I predicted in October 2023, Hamas indeed held the hostages in separate locations in tunnels throughout Gaza, making any mass recovery impossible.
The low rescue numbers stem not only from the inherent difficulties of rescue missions. A military hostage rescue plan would have looked more like the famous Raid on Entebbe – when Israel’s Sayeret Matkal special operations unit rescued more than 100 hostages in under an hour. Instead, the IDF’s failure to bring captives home suggests that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government was much more focused on the primary goal of “destroying Hamas” than the consistently secondary war aim of recovering the hostages.
The efficacy of concessions over military rescues also suggests that the Israeli government could – and should – have brought the hostages home much sooner. Nothing demonstrates Netanyahu’s unseriousness about hostage negotiations more than Israel’s attempt to assassinate the Hamas negotiating team in Doha, Qatar.
3. But kidnappers want more than concessions
Given the massive destruction of the intervening war – an estimated 67,000 Palestinian killed and much of Gaza turned to rubble – it would be crass to call the October 7th attack on Israel a “success.” But from Hamas’s perspective, the attack may have supported a range of possible goals, including and beyond prisoner exchanges. Here are three examples:
– Provoking an overreaction, and gaining support
For instance, Hamas may have launched the October 7th attack to improve its international standing. This is what scholars call a strategy of “provocation.” As Andrew Kydd and Barbara Walter explain, terrorists use a provocation strategy:
… to goad the target government into a military response that harms civilians within the terrorist organization’s home territory. The aim is to convince them that the government is so evil that the radical goals of the terrorists are justified and support for their organization is warranted.
In other words, Hamas may have launched the October 2023 attack with the goal of provoking Israel into an overreaction that would shift broader support toward the Palestinian cause. Indeed, since October 7, 2023, IDF airstrikes have killed tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians, with countless others injured, displaced, and starved.
Two years of war – and resulting international protest – have dramatically degraded support for Israel in the international community. U.S. public support for Israel has fractured. Several of Israel’s longstanding allies, including France, the United Kingdom, and Canada, have taken the symbolic step of recognizing a Palestinian state.
– Solidifying support at home
As much as Hamas may have been concerned with their reputation abroad, the past two years of war have also bolstered their reputation at home. A significant plurality of Palestinians indicated their support for Hamas throughout the war – even as a majority of Gazans lost a family member, or their home.
Beyond provocation, terrorists may also follow an outbidding strategy, Kydd and Walter explain, using “violence to convince the public that the terrorists have greater resolve to fight the enemy than rival groups, and therefore are worthy of support.” In other words, armed groups can use violence to shore up support among their constituency, improving their domestic political standing over their movement rivals.
The October 7th kidnapping played into the longstanding political rivalry between Hamas and Fatah, the leading faction in the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and ruling political party in the West Bank. While Palestinian support for the October 7th attack has declined over time, more Palestinians – in both the West Bank and Gaza – support Hamas than Fatah.
– Deterring even more indiscriminate attacks
Hamas may have taken hostages to serve as human shields, daring the IDF to be complicit in the death of Israeli citizens. Indeed, the Hamas instruction manual to October 7th combatants explicitly instructs kidnappers to use hostages as human shields.
The presence of hundreds of Israeli hostages in Gaza certainly did not stop IDF airstrikes – or Israel’s invasion and ever-expanding war aims. It’s impossible to know – but difficult to imagine – that the hostages held in Gaza’s homes and tunnels may have deterred an even more indiscriminate and destructive Israeli military campaign.
4. For Israel and Hamas, the alternatives were weak
In recent weeks, observers have questioned why the two sides were finally able to agree to a ceasefire and prisoner swap deal. After all, for nearly two years, Netanyahu and Hamas had compelling reasons to continue waging war, giving the adversaries strong alternatives to pursuing peace.
In Israel, Netanyahu had significant domestic incentives to continue fighting. While large portions of the Israeli public protested against the war, Netanyahu needed support from his right-wing coalition to stay in power – a coalition that expressly prioritized destroying Hamas over recovering hostages. By continuing the war and successfully attacking other adversaries in the region, Netanyahu has kept himself in power. For Hamas, holding hostages and staying armed represented their only leverage against an Israeli government committed to their destruction.
However, the alternatives for both sides weakened over time. For Hamas, the costs of captivity were increasing. As my work shows, it is both difficult and dangerous to hold hostages. Kidnapping requires combatants’ labor, resources, and vigilance – all of which were strained by the ongoing war.
Moreover, each side saw international allies increasingly lost patience, especially after Israel’s failed attempt to assassinate the Hamas negotiating team in Doha. President Donald Trump threatened both sides with severe consequences if they failed to make a deal.
With their alternatives dramatically weakened, the Israeli government and Hamas finally came to the negotiating table. The return of all remaining living hostages ends one chapter in this conflict, but the repercussions of October 7th are far from over. As the surviving hostages return home, they begin a long and painful process of healing. Meanwhile, the ceasefire remains fragile, as new conflicts arise over the return of the bodies of hostages who did not survive. Though the hostage crisis is over, Israelis and Palestinians still face many other obstacles to a lasting peace.
