The recent hostage releases demonstrate that life in Israel is priceless. Here and there we heard discordant voices, like the far-right former minister’s remark that four Jewish hostages in exchange for 200 Palestinian perpetrators of blood crimes was a steep price to pay. But for the most part, everyone met the news of the releases with relief and joy.

From families who piously gathered at Tel Aviv’s Hostage Square every Saturday evening for more than 15 months to a prime minister reputed to be indifferent and cynical, there was hardly a false note. The Jewish people respect pidyon shvuyim, the imperative to redeem captives. Unlike empires that recognize only large numbers, the Jewish people understand the only truly great and true number, is one—the one in man, the one of man, and the one of each saved life, which, as Maimonides suggests, is worth all the Sabbaths in the world.

I know no one in Israel who could watch, without immense emotion, the images of Karina, Daniella, Naama and Liri reuniting with the families that awaited them. These four young women, unlike others whose remains we still await, survived an atrocious captivity. But if survival is the humblest form of life, the one that barely keeps us above despair and death, it is also, when it is that of a hostage resisting in the face of humiliation and torture, the highest form of life—the form that soars above us as a secret even greater than that of misfortune.

But then there was the other image—the one that preceded the magnificent moment of reunion. It was the image of the small stage on which the four young women were forced to stand, where they were seen wearing strained smiles, waving at—whom? The Palestinian crowd perched across from them on rubble turned into makeshift bleachers? Their jailers? Their families, so near yet so far, on the other side of the mirror? Each held at arm’s length a strange paper bag containing—no joke!—provisions for the road, some trinkets, a map of the Gaza Strip and, as if they were goods being delivered, a certificate of handover to the Red Cross. The same Red Cross behaved with an utter lack of dignity and did not visit one hostage over the past 481 days.

This second image was chilling. Chilling because of the childlike smiles of the petrified prisoners, frozen at the prospect of those last minutes—so close to the goal yet sticky with tension, knowing that everything could still go wrong. Chilling because of the black-clad, masked men surrounding them—some pressed close, their lifeless fishlike eyes fixed on the captives, others turned away, in mismatched uniforms, either filming them with cellphones or flashing victory signs. And chilling because of what the scene intended to signify—and did, in fact, signify—to the crowds who watched it live, from Jabalia to Rafah, from Jericho to Ramallah, from Cairo to Amman. These crowds have replayed the videos since, as one would rewatch a cult image: an army of criminals wounded but not sunk, weakened but not defeated. An army that often returns only the remains of its captives but still has the power to hold Israel to ransom.

This idea is unbearable. Now more than ever, faced with the cowardly relief that so often accompanies the profound and solemn joy of seeing the first hostages return, it is vital to remember that Israel has always pursued two objectives in this war. The first is the release of the hostages, which was made possible only by Israel’s military pressure. The second is the total defeat of the last pogromist squads, which would otherwise emerge from this disaster as so-called resisters, cloaked in a dark aura that would again inspire those tempted, in Israel and elsewhere, by jihad.

We should resist the ideas that this temptation is irresistible and that silencing the proponent of an idea inevitably gives rise to new adherents ready to take up the cause. Wasn’t al Qaeda slowed after its November 2001 defeat between Tora Bora and Kabul? Wasn’t ISIS stopped when a coalition of free nations destroyed its caliphate from Mosul to Raqqa?

The same must happen in Gaza. Nothing would be more dangerous than leaving behind, as Machiavelli put it, a wounded prince. As long as Hamas retains even a fraction of its capacity to strike—or to govern—Israel can tolerate neither a “durable ceasefire,” a “peace of compromise” nor a “political solution.”

Hamas must be destroyed. The survival of both peoples—Israeli and Palestinian—depends on it. Israel didn’t seek this war, but it must decisively win.