The families’ grief is real, but so too is the truth: their demands now echo Netanyahu’s war aim of dismantling Hamas entirely.
In a Nutshell
On 18 August 2025, the Hostages and Missing Families Forum organised one of the largest demonstrations since the war began. Roads in Tel Aviv were blocked, a general strike spread nationwide, and the message was clear: bring the hostages home.
The anguish is undeniable. Yet beneath the grief lies a political truth often left unsaid: the families’ demand for a complete return deal ultimately depends on what Netanyahu himself demands — the full dismantling of Hamas.
The BBC framed the protests as a “growing rift between the government and its people.”
Source: BBC
The Main Course
Protests in Israel have long been instruments of change. In 1973, the bereaved families of the Yom Kippur War forced Golda Meir’s resignation. In the wake of Lebanon’s 1982 massacre, Israelis demanded accountability from their leaders. Today’s hostage families march in that tradition — grief turned into political force.
But while commentators cast their movement as an indictment of Netanyahu, the reality is more complex. Hamas thrives on leverage. It keeps hostages as currency. To free them, the currency itself must be destroyed. That is precisely Netanyahu’s war aim: break Hamas so that captives lose their value as bargaining chips.
Here lies the paradox: the families’ demand and the government’s strategy converge. Their anger may be directed at Netanyahu, but their hope rests on the very outcome he insists upon.
The Media Recommends
CNN, predictably, spoke of “mounting pressure to abandon the war.”
In each case, the narrative is theatrical: division, moral deafness, popular outrage. What is absent is the harder question — what kind of deal is possible while Hamas remains whole?
The Guardian declared: “Netanyahu deaf to his citizens’ plea for an end to war.”
Source: Guardian
The Merlow View
History tells us that hostage crises end only when the hostage-taker is broken. From Entebbe in 1976 to the release of Soviet refuseniks, freedom came not from protest alone, but from decisive power.
The fantasy is that moral outrage can compel Hamas to release its captives. The reality is that Hamas survives on leverage, and leverage ends only with its defeat. The families’ war and the government’s war are the same war, however uncomfortably that truth sits in public debate.
Sympathy for the families must remain absolute. But sympathy must not become delusion. The logic of war is brutal: freedom will not come from Geneva’s corridors, nor from candlelit vigils, but from dismantling the machinery of terror that made the kidnappings possible in the first place.
The lesson here is not division, but recognition. The families cry for their children. The government fights for survival. Both paths meet at the same destination: Hamas must be broken. To see this clearly is to cut through the theatre of rift and realise that unity, however painful, already exists.
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