U.S. President Donald Trump attends the Gaza International Peace Summit in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, on Monday.Suzanne Plunkett/The Associated Press

For the last two years, when Israelis or diaspora Jews would talk about bringing the last living hostages home, there was a belief their spoken words would never betray: the hostages would not come home. Not all of them. Not all at once.

The hostages were too valuable to Hamas, serving as their only real bargaining chip in a war that the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) will win on strength, military intelligence and strategy every time. In 2011, Israel exchanged 1,027 prisoners for Gilad Shalit, an Israeli soldier captured by Hamas and held in captivity for five years. So what concessions could Hamas extract holding onto a handful now?

But on Monday, what was once unthinkable actually happened: all 20 of the last living Israeli hostages were returned home. And in exchange, Hamas got an end to Israel’s bombing campaign and the release of nearly 2,000 Palestinian prisoners. It did not, notably, secure the withdrawal of the IDF which, for now, still controls 53 per cent of the Gaza Strip.

How? And why now? What convinced Israeli Prime Minister

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