Israel is approaching a new phase in the Gaza plan: a technocratic committee, tentative negotiations over disarmament, and renewed international focus on reconstruction.
Yet one unresolved wound keeps cutting through every communiqué and timetable: the fate of one young man whose absence sits at the center of the country’s conscience.
St.-Sgt.-Maj. Ran Gvili, the last hostage held in Gaza, is a son, a soldier, and a human being with a family waiting for him. His return, even for burial, remains unfinished business for a nation built on a promise that those who serve will never be abandoned.
Phase II is being described in diplomatic language as the movement from fighting to governance. In The Jerusalem Post’s coverage of the new phase, US special envoy Steve Witkoff framed it as “moving from ceasefire to demilitarization.”
The words matter, because they signal intent. They also expose a hard truth: A plan that claims to turn a page still cannot close the most basic chapter, bringing home the last hostage.
As the Post’s Seth J. Frantzman has noted in analysis and reporting around the plan, Phase II proceeds while Gvili's remains are still in Gaza, still unrecovered.
Policy architecture matters. Ceasefire terms matter. Demilitarization frameworks matter. Committees and clauses still fail a society when they float above the human cost that created them. Israel’s public can hold complexity and trade-offs in its head. Israelis also understand something simpler: There is no “next stage” in national healing while the last hostage remains in limbo.
Gvili's family has said this plainly, and it deserves to be treated as national guidance, not private grief: “We cannot move to the next phase of the deal while even one hostage remains in Gaza.” That sentence carries more moral weight than a dozen briefings.
For Gvili's family in Meitar, the war’s human ledger will feel balanced only when he is home. His mother’s words captured a widely felt truth: “Without Gvili, our country can’t heal.” Grief does not respond to diplomatic phrasing. Communal cohesion does not form around progress reports. It forms around shared obligations kept.
Gvili's story is deeply Israeli. He was recovering at home, wounded and awaiting treatment, when the October 7 massacre unfolded. He put on his uniform and ran toward danger to protect people in kibbutzim who were not his own. He acted out of responsibility and out of a reflex Israelis know well: You move when others are in danger. His last known actions were in defense of life.
Ran Gvili deserves a dignified burial in Israel
This is a matter of honoring the dead, and it is also a matter of what a society owes the living. A country that asks young people to run toward fire must keep faith with them afterward. That faith is measured in quiet, practical commitments: identifying, returning, and burying those who fell. It is measured in the promise to families that their loved one will not disappear into permanent uncertainty.
As peace plans advance on paper, a jarring gap has opened between technical progress and emotional justice. Diplomats may focus on weapons, governance, and rebuilding. Ordinary citizens see Gvili's photograph. They imagine the empty chair at a Shabbat table. They hear the silence where a voice should be. In a country that prizes responsibility and moral discipline, leaving one of our own behind, even after death, reads as a national failure.
Mediators and regional powers speak the language of demilitarization and transitional authorities. Israel should engage seriously in those discussions, with hard-headed realism. Phase II still needs one clear imperative carried into every room, every negotiation, every timetable: Bring him home.
Rani’s parents have refused to surrender to despair. His sister has taken the plea to the United Nations. Communities around the world have projected his image on billboards, including in New York’s Times Square. These actions express empathy for a family’s pain, and they remind the world that people often judge our humanity before they parse our policy.
If Israel is to move from war to recovery and from pain to reconstruction, Gvili must be returned. His homecoming can mark a national recommitment to its deepest values. It can give a grieving family the dignity of burial and give a battered society a moment of moral alignment.
Phase II will be measured in clauses signed and mechanisms built. It will also be judged by whether Israel proves, through action, that no soldier and no citizen is treated as negotiable or expendable, and that no one is left behind, including in death.