Two years and a few days after Hamas attacked Israel, there is peace in Gaza. On October 13, 2025, after more than 700 days of captivity, the last 20 surviving Israeli hostages were released. According to the agreement between the two sides, this will be followed by the return of the bodies of Israeli hostages who have died in the meantime, and the Israelis will release more than 1,700 Palestinian prisoners.
The Israeli guns that attacked Gaza fell silent on October 10, a precondition for the subsequent prisoner and hostage exchange. Since then, first from Gaza and now from Israel, cathartic images of people celebrating peace have emerged, the likes of which we have not seen in the region for a long time. The sudden peace stands on shaky foundations, the countless threads of war are still unstitched, but there is no doubt that getting this far is a huge achievement.
The fact that the guns fell silent after two years, and the hostages who survived the war in hellish conditions but were able to return home, was obviously due to the fact that the warring parties were tired of the conflict.
Hamas scored its greatest victory in history on October 7, 2023, unleashing killings, violence, and the kidnapping of more than two hundred hostages into Gaza. Since then, it has been steadily declining, unleashing the greatest catastrophe in its history on the long-suffering Palestinian people.
Tens of thousands have died, hundreds of thousands have been injured, and much of Gaza's infrastructure, from homes to schools, has been destroyed. Perhaps the best evidence of the scale of the two-year Israeli offensive, which some say amounts to war crimes and, according to leading experts, is the fact that Hamas was unable to keep even its greatest treasures, the hostages intended as a bargaining chip in future peace negotiations, alive. Some of them survived the war with their guards, presumably in the labyrinthine tunnel system beneath Gaza, while others died in circumstances that are still unclear, probably along with those who were guarding them.
After two years, Hamas didn't have many good cards left in the war, and although they could have held on for a while, they may have felt that this was the point at which it was no longer worth going any further.
