Wars usually start with territory, resources, or deterrence. They end when costs outweigh gains. However, Israel’s war, now grinding into its second year, defies conventional cost-benefit analysis. At its center there are no oil fields, no buffer zones, and no strategic depth, but a few dozen abducted citizens hidden in Gaza’s subterranean battlespace like bargaining chips of flesh and blood.
From a pure operational planning perspective, it makes little sense: Billions of shekels burned through; thousands of flight hours logged in intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance missions; repeated kinetic operations into hostile urban terrain; and dozens of IDF soldiers killed and wounded in complex MOUT (military operations in urban terrain).
International support is eroding. Still, the campaign continues with a relentless tempo. Why? Because the hostages are not a bargaining chip. They are a sacred value, and sacred values are impervious to deterrence calculus.
Psychologists call them non-fungible commitments – values immune to trade-offs. A flag, a homeland, a comrade’s life. These are the domains where rational actor models collapse and where people willingly accept disproportionate costs to preserve moral identity. For Israelis, the hostages represent the social contract itself: the promise that the State of Israel will never leave its citizens behind enemy lines.
The trauma of October 7, 2023, entire families slaughtered and civilians dragged across the border, seared that contract into the collective psyche. Psychologists call it a flashbulb memory, a wound that reshapes national identity. From that moment forward, every strategic objective, operational maneuver, and tactical raid has been judged by one haunting criterion: Are the hostages coming home?
Sacred logic overrides military logic
There is military logic, and there is sacred logic. Militaries normally think of force ratios, attrition rates, and deterrence thresholds. Commanders calculate acceptable losses. Yet sacred logic overrides all of that. One hostage outweighs a hundred tactical victories. The IDF’s creed of “we leave no one behind” is more than doctrine; it is the psychological operating system of a nation forged from eons of trauma and perpetual siege.
That’s why Israel once traded 1,027 Palestinian prisoners for one soldier – Gilad Schalit. Strategically, it was asymmetric. Psychologically, it was inevitable. To abandon him would have been to commit cognitive suicide, a collapse of the very narrative that sustains national resilience.
Picture Gaza’s underworld, which is no more than a network-centric battlespace of tunnels, shafts, and fortified chambers, a “subterranean enemy system” designed to nullify Israel’s conventional superiority.
Within this black maze, hostages are held as high-value assets, used to exert continuous psychological operations (PSYOP) against Israel. Every ground incursion, whether into Rafah or Khan Yunis, carries dual mission sets: neutralize Hamas’s combat formations and search for intelligence that might lead to a rescue.
Militarily, the hostages are insignificant. Psychologically, they dominate the strategic center of gravity.
Israel battles two fronts: externally and internally
In Israel’s Psychological Battlefield, Israel is fighting on two fronts simultaneously. The IDF is fighting externally against Hamas in a grueling counterinsurgency, a hybrid warfare environment that blends guerrilla tactics, asymmetric leverage, and subterranean fortifications. Israel is also fighting internally against despair, fragmentation, and what psychologists note as “moral injury,” the fear that the state cannot fulfill its most sacred duty to protect its people.
The hostage families, encamped outside the prime minister’s home or office, serve as a domestic pressure vector. Weekly candlelight vigils are not just rituals of grief; they are acts of identity maintenance, reinforcing the sacred bond. Hamas understands this and exploits it, drip-feeding hostage videos and rumors to keep Israeli society in a state of chronic hyperarousal – a classic PSYOP technique.
Sacred wars are unwinnable in conventional terms. Because when the mission is defined as a moral absolute, cost-imposition strategies and rational bargaining lose traction. To stop before the hostages come home would not just be a mission abort; it would be a catastrophic failure of legitimacy, a psychological rout.
This is why Israel fights on, two years later, deploying combined-arms task forces, burning through ammunition stockpiles, and weathering international censure. The war is not about deterrence theory or territorial denial anymore. It is about collective survival psychology. The hostages are not collateral. They are the sacred proof of whether Israel remains what it claims to be – a state that never abandons its people.
Until they are returned, dead or alive, the war will not end. Because in sacred wars, the battlefield is not only on the streets of Gaza. It is the human mind.
Dr. Michael J. Salamon is a psychologist specializing in trauma and abuse and director of ADC Psychological Services in Netanya and Hewlett, NY.
Louis Libin is an expert in military strategies, wireless innovation, emergency communications, and cybersecurity.