For Jonathan Dekel-Chen, the nightmares of October 7 never go away. “Not a single household” went untouched, he shakes his head slowly, “either by someone being murdered, or taken hostage, or both.” “[I]t’s been a year of agony,” the professor at Hebrew University admits, trying to shut out the image of his son putting his wife and children in a safe house while the 36-year-old went out to defend the kibbutz. The American citizen was taken hostage, wounded, and last seen alive 11 long months ago. To his family and others, the news that Hamas’s Yahya Sinwar, the massacre’s mastermind, has been killed, comes with mixed emotions. Justice was served, they agree, but at what cost?

Yehuda Cohen, another father of a soldier in captivity, told an Israeli news station that Sinwar’s death could either be very good — or very bad. On one hand, it could help speed up the hostages’ release; on the other, it could result in the worst form of revenge. “I hope no order has gone out,” he worries, referring to the captives’ execution. It wouldn’t be the first time, many warn. As The New York Times reported, six hostages were shot at close range in late August by their captors in Rafah as Israeli soldiers closed in above them.

Of the 101 hostages remaining in Gaza after their kidnapping, at least a third are believed to be dead. The mother of Matan Zanguaker, Einav, pleaded with world leaders to act, insisting that Sinwar’s murder would be a death sentence for her son. “Now, more than ever, the lives of my son Matan and the other hostages are in tangible danger.”

No one knows what to expect in this new phase of the war. “I heard a lot of celebrations and cheers of joy in my neighborhood, and justifiably so,” Anna Astmaker, a cousin of one of the missing recounted. “But my head immediately filled with questions,” she added. “What does it mean for Karina and the other hostages?” Former FBI agent Christopher O’Leary is sorry to say he expects the worst. “Hamas may want to send a strategic message by taking Sinwar’s death out on the hostages. The group has often discussed a strategy of an ‘eye for an eye,” he warned.

Nevertheless, the United States and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu are optimistic after eliminating what they called “the chief obstacle” to a possible ceasefire. Sinwar was “a mass murderer who killed thousands of Israelis and kidnapped hundreds of our citizens. Today, evil took a heavy blow,” the leader of the Jewish state declared before adding, “the mission ahead of us is still unfinished.” Even so, Bibi acknowledged, his end does signal “an important milestone in the sunset of Hamas’s evil rule in Gaza.”

For more than a year, American and Israeli intelligence groups and Special Operations teams have hunted Sinwar, who was ultimately taken out by a unit of “trainee squad commanders” who “unexpectedly encountered the monster while operating in southern Gaza, anonymous sources say. The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) in the area didn’t even realize they were exchanging fire with the architect of October 7 until his body was discovered, bearing “a striking resemblance to the leader of Hamas.”

“It’s a game-changer,” Senator Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) told Family Research Council President Tony Perkins on Thursday’s “Washington Watch.” “It’s equivalent to killing Bin Laden,” he insisted. “It cuts the head of the snake off. Somebody may try to replace him, but Hamas is tremendously diminished.” If Hamas is destroyed militarily and politically, he continued, “You have an opportunity to do in Gaza what we did in Germany and Japan, rebuild the place from extremists to people that can live in peace with their neighbor. So it does create a possibility for Arabs like Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates to come in and fill the vacuum created by the demise of Hamas, which would be great news for Israel, because the UAE and Saudi Arabia are willing to live in peace with Israel.”

As for what Sinwar’s absence will mean for negotiations, Graham believes it changes everything. “The biggest loser in all of this is Iran. I’ve never believed the hostages would be released until there’s a real diminishment of the influence of Iran. So with Hezbollah suffering losses of leadership and fighters in Lebanon and now the killing of Sinwar, I think Iran’s ability to use their proxies, Hamas and Hezbollah, has been reduced,” he explained. “So you have an opening not only for the hostage deal, but to implement what I’ve been working on for a year and a half,” which is the expansion of the Abraham Accords. “I think the death of Sinwar makes that more likely than ever.”

If the Arabs make peace with the Israelis, the South Carolina Republican pointed out, that’s a worst-case scenario for radical Islam. “You’ve effectively ended the Arab-Israeli conflict,” he argued. In a formalized relationship like that, “you have a united Arab front which stands against Iran and what they’re trying to do in the Middle East,” Perkins pointed out. “You do,” Graham agreed. “And that’s the ultimate change in our lifetimes. You know, the hope has always been for the Arabs to march toward the light, away from the darkness. The Abraham Accords were historic … and again, I’ll go back to October the 7th. The intel is clear. One of the main reasons this attack occurred was to stop the march toward normalization between Saudi and Israel, a nightmare for Iran.”

Of course, none of this is thanks to the Biden-Harris administration, who’s had “one foot out and one foot in when helping Israel,” Graham said with disgust. “And Israel was smart enough and clear enough in their thinking to go into Rafah and destroy Hamas militarily, which they [have] virtually done.” But this idea that America would withhold weapons at such a critical juncture, as the White House threatened this week, is absurd.” And “I promise you,” he warned, “there will be a big pushback in the Congress because we appropriated money for these weapons.”

The long game, he pointed out, is not only stabilizing the region — which Sinwar’s death may ultimately do — but also deradicalizing it. “That’s the only way to really help the Palestinians. And I would just add this: they’re the most radicalized people on the planet, the Palestinians, they’re taught from birth to death to kill the Jews. And that needs to stop.”

In the meantime, families of the lost watch and wait. “It’s our own crisis of having a hostage that we know nothing of his fate,” Dekel-Chen admitted. “We don’t know what the future holds for any of us.” It’s an uncertainty Matar’s mom shares. “There will be no real closure, there will be no total victory, if we don’t save lives and bring them home,” she maintained.