This is simply false. There was no documented “day one” offer by Hamas to release all the hostages “unconditionally.” Contemporary reporting describes negotiations over exchanges: Israeli women and children for Palestinian terrorists, and later broader releases in return for pauses, additional terrorist prisoners and other concessions. Nothing was unconditional. I say this as a hostage family member who served as an international envoy for the hostage families and was privy to some of the discourse behind closed doors with relevant stakeholders. Those conversations concerned negotiations, conditions, categories of hostages and concessions, not the simplistic narrative you now declare “well established and proven.” Hamas did not even treat many civilian men as civilians. My brother-in-law, Omri Miran, was a civilian father kidnapped from his home in Kibbutz Nahal Oz, in front of his wife and two little girls. He was held for 738 days, physically tortured, deprived of food and water, and psychologically abused. Hamas used Omri and other beautiful human beings as bargaining chips: women, children, the elderly, civilian men, soldiers, Israelis and foreigners. Taking civilians hostage is a war crime, and captured soldiers cannot lawfully be held as hostages to coerce concessions either. There is plenty to criticise about the Israeli government’s conduct, including decisions made during negotiations, even if those were ultimately decisions for a democratically elected government to make. Hostage families have hardly been silent about them, and many of us still demand accountability and the establishment of a national commission of inquiry. But none of that transfers responsibility from the perpetrators: Hamas and its accomplices, and the state actors that funded and sponsored their activities. That is what makes your rhetoric so repulsive. You erase Hamas’s agency, recast conditional negotiations as an unconditional “offer to release them on day one,” and shift responsibility from the hostage-takers to the society they attacked. Hamas kidnapped these people, categorised them according to their value, demanded concessions for them, abused them and held people like Omri for years. Turning that into “Israel refused to save them because it wanted vengeance” is not an established fact. It is an inversion of perpetrator and victim that sanitises Hamas’s responsibility for one of its most grotesque crimes, a distortion you have pushed in bad faith since the war Hamas launched on October 7.