The 736 Days That Disappeared From the Gaza Narrative

Seven hundred and thirty-six days. That is how long the last living hostages kidnapped on October 7, 2023 spent in captivity. Two years and six days.

By the time they finally came home on October 13, 2025, Gaza was a different place. Israel was a different country too. And the world had spent more than two years debating a war whose beginning everyone remembered: around 1,200 people killed by Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups, followed by the Israeli offensive, the bombing, the destruction and tens of thousands of Palestinian deaths.

But somewhere along the way, as the story became shorter and more familiar, another 251 people began to fade from it.

The hostages.

They never disappeared from the news. Their photographs remained on walls and streets, their families kept campaigning, and there were demonstrations, appeals and endless negotiations. Yet somehow they gradually stopped occupying the same place in the story of the war that they had occupied at the beginning.

That is difficult to understand, because the hostages were not only victims of October 7. For the next two years, their fate was one of the central issues in almost every serious attempt to stop the war.

Of the 251 people abducted, 168 eventually returned alive. Roughly two out of three. The last 20 living hostages came home on October 13, 2025, after 736 days. The remains of the final hostage still held in Gaza were not recovered until January 26, 2026.

The story of the hostages, in other words, ran through almost the entire war.

The connection was already clear in November 2023, when a pause in the fighting allowed hostages to be released in exchange for Palestinian prisoners. The war did not end, but something important had been established: the release of hostages and a halt in the fighting could be negotiated together.

Then came months of talks mediated by Qatar, Egypt and the United States. They argued over numbers and names, Palestinian prisoners, the length of a truce, Israeli withdrawal and humanitarian aid. But one issue kept returning.

The hostages.

By June 2024, the connection was written into a United Nations Security Council resolution. Resolution 2735 envisaged a first phase involving a ceasefire, the release of hostages and Palestinian prisoners, Israeli withdrawal from populated areas and increased humanitarian aid. The second phase was supposed to go much further: the release of all remaining hostages, the withdrawal of Israeli forces from Gaza and a permanent end to hostilities.

So the hostages were hardly a humanitarian footnote to the war. They were one of the keys to the negotiations.

Which leaves an obvious question.

Why didn’t Hamas release them?

As the Palestinian death toll rose and demands for a ceasefire became increasingly urgent around the world, Hamas continued to hold the people it had kidnapped.

Hamas could not decide on its own when Israel would stop bombing Gaza. But it could decide what to do with the hostages.

It kept them.

It kept them as bargaining chips, and that matters when we try to understand why the war lasted as long as it did. As long as the hostages remained captive, one of the central issues in the negotiations remained unresolved.

Would Israel have ended the war immediately if Hamas had released all 251 much earlier?

We cannot know.

Israel had other military and political objectives, and the Israeli government made decisions of its own that affected both the duration and the intensity of the war.

But there is another, more useful question: would an earlier release of the hostages have made an earlier ceasefire easier to achieve?

Here we are no longer dealing only with speculation. Again and again, the negotiations themselves linked the two.

We saw it once more in January 2025. A ceasefire began on January 19. During the following 42 days, hostages were released, Israel released Palestinian prisoners and detainees, humanitarian aid entering Gaza increased substantially and the fighting fell dramatically.

Then negotiations over the second phase failed. On March 18, Israel resumed major military operations.

That alone should warn us against easy conclusions. The hostages were clearly not the only obstacle to ending the war. But it is equally difficult to pretend that they were merely a side issue.

Then came October 2025.

Another agreement, another ceasefire, and once again hostages and Palestinian prisoners were part of the same mechanism.

On October 13, the last 20 living hostages were released.

They had been held for 736 days.

There is something particularly disturbing about that chronology. While those people remained in captivity and their families waited without knowing whether they would ever see them again, Gaza was being destroyed. Palestinian civilians were dying, families were being displaced and the humanitarian situation was deteriorating.

And throughout all of this, Hamas still had one decision in its own hands. It did not need permission from Israel, the United States, Qatar, Egypt or the United Nations to make it.

It could release the people it had kidnapped.

It chose not to release them unconditionally.

That left both populations trapped in a terrible dynamic. The hostages remained prisoners. Palestinian civilians remained caught in a devastating war. And the kidnapped men and women continued to be used as bargaining chips in the very negotiations intended to stop that war.

Hamas was not responsible for every bomb Israel dropped, and we cannot know what the Israeli government would have done had all 251 hostages been released earlier.

But Hamas was responsible for something very specific: for more than two years it held kidnapped people whose release was repeatedly tied to negotiations for a ceasefire.

That part of the story matters.

Yet when those years are condensed into a few sentences, we often move from the roughly 1,200 people killed on October 7 almost directly to the Israeli offensive, the destruction of Gaza and the tens of thousands of Palestinian deaths.

Somewhere between those two parts of the story are 251 people.

Leave them out and the story becomes simpler: there was an atrocity, there was a response, and then there was a devastating war.

Put them back in and the picture becomes much more uncomfortable. Because for those 736 days, the question was not only how to stop Israel. There were also people Hamas could release and chose not to release, even while their fate repeatedly formed part of the negotiations aimed at stopping the fighting.

So perhaps the question is not why the world forgot the hostages. It never completely did.

The more difficult question is this:

How did 251 people go from being one of the central facts explaining how this war began to occupying such a small place when we try to explain why it lasted so long?

The last survivors waited 736 days to come home.

For all that time they were victims.

But they were also one of the keys to the door everyone said they wanted to open.

The door to a ceasefire.

Néstor Daniel Scherman