After 843 days, Israel laid to rest the body of 24-year-old Ran Gvili, the final hostage held in Gaza. With his return last week, a promise made in the aftermath of Oct. 7, 2023, has been fulfilled: No Jew taken by force would be left behind.

This moment is not about closure; it is also about agency.

Oct. 7 was not only an act of mass murder, but an attempt to reorder Jewish history by force, to return Jews to a familiar role as hunted subjects. The brutality was deliberate, the spectacle intentional, and the message unmistakable. Hamas believed Jewish endurance would fracture under sufficient cruelty.

Hamas murdered more than 1,200 people and abducted 251, including women, children, men, and grandparents. The aim was to degrade and dissolve Jewish pride. For 843 days, as Jews around the world faced record levels of assault for the crime of their identity, Oct. 7 did not end. It repeated on a loop as a threat to Jewish agency itself.

Because memory fades and denial thrives on distance, it must again be stated plainly what Hamas did on that day.

Parents and children were bound together with wire and burned alive inside their homes. Entire families, even their pets, were systematically slaughtered in Israeli villages populated by peace activists who had spent years advocating for coexistence and the rights of Palestinian Arabs in Gaza. They believed, until their final moments, that shared humanity would protect them.

Grenades were thrown repeatedly into homes and roadside shelters, packed with civilians of all ages who begged for their lives. At the Nova music festival, a gathering celebrating peace and life, 378 people were murdered, many shot in the back while fleeing, others executed at point-blank range.

Women and girls were gang-raped, tortured and genitally mutilated. Almost all were murdered afterward, some during the assaults themselves. Hamas proudly documented and released its crimes, wearing GoPro cameras. Terrorists used the phones of murdered victims to upload images and videos of the killings to social media so that families and friends would witness the final moments of those they loved. This was curated cruelty broadcast in real time.

This level of barbarity was meant as psychological warfare. Hamas sought to demonstrate that Jews could still be hunted in their homes. They assumed that the response to such evil would be moral confusion, hesitation and paralysis.

They were wrong.

Eight hundred and forty-three days later, Israel endured against all of its enemies militarily, politically and psychologically while the world demanded retreat. Today, Hamas’s senior military and political leadership has been eliminated, its governing capacity dismantled, and thousands of terrorists and much of their terror tunnel network have been neutralized. The organization that promised endless resistance now governs rubble.

Hezbollah, long mythologized as Israel’s greatest existential threat, chose to widen the war by bombing a children’s soccer field in the Druze village of Majdal Shams, killing 12 young people. 

Israel responded with precision and finality. Senior Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah and his successor were eliminated; the terror group’s arsenal in Southern Lebanon was destroyed, and its command structure was crippled. The regime of longtime Syrian dictator Bashar Assad, a sponsor of Hamas and Hezbollah, collapsed. 

Iran, the architect of this entire system, briefly entered the conflict and suffered the destruction of key air defenses, ballistic-missile stockpiles and nuclear sites. It now clings to power by killing tens of thousands of its own citizens.

None of this came without massive cost; 923 Israeli soldiers and 70 police officers were killed defending their people. Among them was Gvili, now remembered as the last to return home.

On the morning of the massacre, he was on medical leave, awaiting surgery for a broken shoulder. When he learned that terrorists were slaughtering civilians at the Nova festival in Re’im, he didn’t wait for orders. He took his service rifle, mounted his motorcycle and rode toward the gunfire. He then continued toward Kibbutz Alumim, where terrorists were pouring in.

The final image of Gvili shows terrorists dragging his body into Gaza on a motorcycle. Around the area where he made his stand lay the bodies of dozens of terrorists killed by his fire. Residents of the kibbutz call him “Ran, the Defender of Alumim.”

According to his parents, Gvili couldn’t allow his friends to risk their lives without him doing the same. His actions have been credited with saving dozens of lives.

Indeed, his conduct revealed the moral core of this war. He acted that day with agency in the face of evil and a responsibility to his fellow man.

With his return, Israel can finally breathe because the historical record has been answered. Relief is the beginning of reckoning. Israel has now achieved two of its declared objectives: the return of all hostages and the destruction of Hamas’s governing military capacity. 

Oct. 7 exposed the cost of moral confusion in the face of explicit evil. Its aftermath demonstrated that Jewish agency, exercised without apology, is a fulfillment of moral values. Hamas sought to return Jews to history as helpless subjects. Instead, 21st-century Jews refused to behave as history’s victims ever again.

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