Opinion: Israeli hostage rescue exposes a new layer of feeling in this horrifying war

(CNN) — After almost 250 days of fear, horror and death, a sliver of good news out of the conflict between Israel and Hamas: Four hostages, civilians kidnapped by Hamas from the Nova music festival on October 7, were rescued by Israeli forces on Saturday.

But it’s not an unalloyed victory. The rescue was complex and, as is often the case, did not go all that smoothly. It also extracted a devastating civilian cost — a truth that complicates what should be a happy narrative about innocents rescued in a daring effort.

The hostages were being held in two residential buildings in a civilian area. In one apartment, fire fights broke out. Once the hostages were rescued, they were taken to the Mediterranean coast and evacuated via helicopter, but, as local resident Khalil Al Tirawi, told CNN, the operation was devastating to civilians, “a barrage of heavy gunfire, artillery missiles, rockets.”

In the end, the four Israeli hostages were thankfully brought home safely. But dozens of Palestinians lost their lives and many more were injured. The numbers are unclear – the Gazan Health Ministry, which is controlled by Hamas, says 274 Palestinians were killed; the Israeli military said it was fewer than 100. CNN cannot independently verify either figure and neither entity provided a breakdown of militant deaths versus civilian ones — but, undoubtedly, yet again, innocents were killed in a war they didn’t start and that has resulted in an overwhelming loss of life.

This is a complicated moment. The rescue of the four hostages, Noa Argamani, Almog Meir Jan, Andrey Kozlov and Shlomi Ziv, is an unquestioned good, and the fact that they were being held in a civilian area, putting so many innocent lives at risk, is an example of just how cavalier Hamas is toward the Palestinian life they claim to value. Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar referred to civilian deaths in earlier wars as “necessary sacrifices.”

But the hostage rescue also created one of the deadliest events in this war, with scores of people dead and wounded. It’s reasonable to wonder whether this could have been avoided with an earlier ceasefire agreement and a hostage exchange deal, efforts that have been stymied by both sides.

In the past several months, Israel has refused ceasefire agreements that would have released many hostages, to the great outrage of the hostages’ families. Many have taken to the streets to protest.

And so, the weekend’s rescue is a victory for Israel, but one with big caveats. Far too many innocent Gazans have been killed in this war. Many hostages are still in captivity; others have been killed. As with so much else in this war, many observers and commentators evince a stunning disregard for human suffering felt on whichever side they’ve decided is “other.” Some shrug off the mass death of Palestinians as the natural outcome of war or even a deserved end for civilians included, while others suggest that captivity wasn’t so bad for Israeli hostages and whitewash Hamas’s brutality and strategy of putting civilians in the crossfire.

It is possible to hold many truths at once: that hostage-taking is a war crime and Hamas’s atrocities on Oct. 7 were evil and devastating. That Israel’s scorched-earth response has extracted a shattering toll — death, destruction, fear, hunger — from thousands of innocents who did nothing other than be born Palestinian.

It’s also worth noting that the three male hostages who were rescued were unlikely to be at the top of any hostage exchange list, simply by the fact of their gender. Hostage negotiations have historically prioritized the release of women and children, and this was the case in the hostage release deal Israel and Hamas struck back in November. But the families of Almog Meir Jan, Andrey Kozlov and Shlomi Ziv surely love them as much as the families of the young women and children taken by Hamas. Had their lives been lost, it would have been just as hard of a blow to their loved ones, communities and countries.

Meir is just 22 years old and his father died hours before his son was returned to Israel, the father’s sister told Kan News, a CNN affiliate. As the Jerusalem Post reported, Meir’s mother, Orit, said that “this is the first time I have slept in eight months,” but added that “there are 120 families who are waiting without being able to breathe or sleep without thinking about their loved ones in Gaza.” She used the moment to press her government for a deal to release all of the hostages.

Andrey Kozlov, 27, dropped to his knees and sobbed when he saw his mother for the first time. He had only moved to Israel from Russia about a year ago.

Shlomi Ziv, 41, said he learned Arabic while in captivity, according to Israel’s Channel 13, with Al-Jazeera on the television and his captors enforcing daily prayer and Quran readings. According to The Jerusalem Post, upon his return to Israel, he learned that the two friends he had been with at the music festival had been murdered and he began to cry. His cousin, Liat Ariel, also spoke out about the hostages who remain captive, calling Ziv’s rescue a “miraculous operation.”

“But we cannot stop and we will not rest. We still have 120 hostages in Gaza and they have to get out of there. We need to close a deal,” she said.

Noa Argamani, 26, has for months been one of the most prominent faces of the Israeli captives in Gaza, after a video of her kidnapping circulated widely on social media. Her family made public pleas for her release as her mother was battling brain cancer. “I want to see her one more time. Talk to her one more time,” Liora Argamani, 61, said. “I don’t have a lot of time left in this world.”

Argamani did make it to see her mother, but her mother’s condition has badly deteriorated. “I believe she understood what was happening. There was a foggy response, but Liora is in a bad way, and she barely looked at Noa,” her father, Yaakov said, according to the Times of Israel. Argamani’s boyfriend, Avinatan Or, was also kidnapped from the Nova festival and remains held in Gaza.

These details matter, because these four are not simply “hostages” or symbols of a greater cause, but human beings with full lives and valuable futures.

The same is true for the hundreds of thousands of Palestinian civilians who have been injured, killed, displaced and traumatized by this war — most of whose names the broader public will never know, and whose faces we’ll never see. They, too, are not simply “casualties” or “civilians” or “collateral damage,” but people whose safety and futures have been snatched away.

There is no limit on the breadth of our empathy or our ability to care about many people and many wrongs at once. Brutal wars like the one between Israel and Hamas can test our humanity. Many of us could take a lesson from the most vocal families of the hostages and press for less carnage, less violence and a peaceful long-term solution to this abominable war.

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