No one knows if Edan Alexander understood how close he was to freedom. The last living American hostage in Gaza is only 21, a boy who grew into an Israel Defense Forces (IDF) soldier after spending his whole life in New Jersey. For 530 days, he’s sat in suffocating darkness, waiting for a turn that has never come. While every other American has been released — or died hoping — Edan was supposed to be next. Now, back in tunnels that are full of lice, bedbugs, mold, and mildew, the sound of Israeli bombs overhead must be gut-wrenching. To him and to the handful of other prisoners, it can only mean one thing: the war, their war, isn’t over.

For a parent, there is no greater agony than being this close. “The latest that we have is from the released hostages actually, who saw him in those tunnels,” Adi Alexander told reporters last week. “He was held with some of them.” He paused, then said, “He’s in very tough conditions.” Like so many other families, seeing his son alive last Thanksgiving in a video where he begged for his life was both a relief and a horror. He looked so pale, Adi shared emotionally, so gaunt.

Whatever dreams they had to end this nightmare came crashing down Saturday when Hamas refused to follow through with its commitment to release Edan and four sets of remains. According to Reuters, the deal suddenly fell apart when two Hamas officials decided the agreement “was conditional on beginning the talks on the second phase of the ceasefire, opening crossings, and lifting the Israeli blockade.” Infuriated by the constant push and pull, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu rejected the terms as “psychological warfare.”

U.S. Special Envoy Steve Witkoff was equally frustrated. “Unfortunately, Hamas has chosen to respond by publicly claiming flexibility while privately making demands that are entirely impractical without a permanent ceasefire,” he said before warning, “Hamas is making a very bad bet that time is on its side. It is not. Hamas is well aware of the deadline and should know that we will respond accordingly if that deadline passes.”

Before dawn broke over Gaza Tuesday, the war that had been on the most fragile of pauses, began again with a vengeance. Israel unleashed strikes from the north to the south, flooding the skies with fighter jets and pounding the area with weeks of pent-up fury. On the ground, people who’ve survived can only shake their heads at the force of the IDF. “It felt like Armageddon.” Another doctor says she’s experienced “nothing close” to it in all the months of conflict. “From now on,” Netanyahu declared, “Israel will act against Hamas with increasing military force.”

The Trump administration stood by the Jewish state, insisting that “Hamas could have released hostages to extend the ceasefire but instead chose refusal and war,” National Security Council Spokesman Brian Hughes reiterated. Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt was just as unflinching. “The Trump administration and the White House were consulted by the Israelis on their attacks in Gaza tonight — and as President Trump has made it clear, Hamas, the Houthis, all those who seek to terrorize not just Israel but also the United States of America, will see a price to pay. All hell will break loose.”

The easiest path to end the bloodshed, negotiators insist, is to set the remaining captives free. “If Hamas does not release all the hostages, the gates of hell will open in Gaza, and Hamas’s murderers and rapists will meet the IDF with forces they have never known before,” Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz emphasized. “The rules of the game have changed.”

In the meantime, the two dozen captives presumed alive wait in consuming fear about what this next phase of war might mean. Because of his service in the IDF, witnesses say Edan has suffered much more severe torture and interrogation than his civilian brothers and sisters. Desperate to try to obtain some army intelligence, Hamas has withheld sunlight, food, and offered only deadly salt water for drinking in long stretches.

Other hostages like Tal Shoham say they were guarded by “extremely violent” men who “made some of us kneel like dogs and beat us.” But even after losing 64 pounds, he still says isolation was “worse than the hunger.”

Around the world, one of the most heart-wrenching moments had to be seeing the reaction of two hostages who’d been driven to the prisoner exchange site, where they were forced to watch others go free. The sickening footage showed Guy Gilboa-Dalal and Evyatar David crying and pleading to be released in a display that Guy’s brother called “pure evil.” Gal, who’d been at the president’s CPAC speech when he saw the video, had trouble putting it into words. “It was very, very hard to see my brother watching his best friends getting out of this hell while he was dragged back to hell,” he said painfully. “What they did in this video is they showed my brother what freedom might look like for him, then they closed the door.”

And yet, the global community is directing all of its outrage at Israel, calling it a “heinous crime” that Netanyahu’s country would bombard Gaza after Hamas violated its own terms. Frankly, Lt. Colonel (Ret.) Bob Maginnis told The Washington Stand, “Israel faces a Hobson’s choice regarding Hamas’s hold on Gaza,” which is no choice at all. “The terror group will never cave to Israel’s demands. So either Jerusalem can naively sit on its hands believing Hamas and its sponsors will eventually release the remaining hostages or, alternatively, as today’s airstrike demonstrates, Israel can attack and accept the criticism from both the families of the remaining hostages and the broader international community.”

It’s not Netanyahu’s fault that innocent people are dying when both “Israel and the U.S. have floated the idea of relocating the Gaza Palestinians elsewhere — like Somalia or Jordan — to bring the conflict to a conclusion,” he told TWS. “Of course, the hatred for Israel among the Hamas-controlled Palestinians keeps most of them in place and vulnerable to becoming casualties in the ongoing conflict. That is what happened in the airstrike today,” Maginnis underscored.

At the end of the day, “The only pathway to bring peace to Gaza is the elimination of Hamas,” he warned. “Unfortunately, the terror group will continue to use the Palestinian people as a shield against IDF attacks until such time as the last jihadist is dead — or no one is left alive in the territory. Either way,” Maginnis stressed, “the outcome plays into the hands of the terror group’s sponsors in Iran, who use the international horror regarding the mounting death toll as a foil against Israel and its sponsors like the United States.”

And while “this is ultimately a decision for Israel’s leaders in Jerusalem,” he conceded, “the U.S. must provide that nation moral support and sufficient weapons to complete the job — destroy Hamas.”

Former Green Beret-turned-Congressman Pat Harrigan (R-N.C.) told Family Research Council’s Jody Hice that yes, the collapse of the ceasefire was “an unfortunate development,” but he argued that “Israel is absolutely within their right to take this action.” “We’ve got to keep in mind we’re dealing with terrorists,” he reminded America on Tuesday’s “Washington Watch.” “We’re dealing with people that believe that it is pleasing to God to kill folks who are non-Muslims and to wipe Israel off the face of the earth. That is not something that we stand for.”

Asked what he would say to the critics of Israel, Harrigan said simply, “Hamas has earned this. They’ve earned it. They earned it on October 7th. They earned it when they mercilessly killed these Israeli hostages. They earned it when they paraded the Bibas family through the streets of Gaza. And they’ve earned it with their systemic decisions to choose terror and murder instead of acting like a civilized society.” As he reiterated, “They’ve given Israel absolutely no choice. And it’s unfortunate. But in this world, people do make choices, and they have to live with those consequences.”