The names of Eden Yerushalmi, Ori Danino, Alex Lobanov, Carmel Gat, Almog Sarusi, and Hersh Goldberg-Polin should be seared into the minds of anyone who wishes to live in a civilized world. Instead, we read headlines in our most storied media outlets describing these six Israelis as having “died” in Gaza. We are told that those defending their murderous captors “have a point.”

As Matti Friedman writes in his searing column today from Jerusalem: “Hersh was an American citizen, born in California—and in California and elsewhere, we learned that other Americans would tear down his poster and those with the faces of other Israeli hostages. We’ve seen the support of the American administration wane as the war wears on, including an explicit demand by the White House to stay out of the southern Gaza city of Rafah—the city where Hersh and the five other hostages were just found by our soldiers, but too late.”

In a time of so much darkness—“The idea of being kidnapped by terrorists became a familiar one in our home, a subject discussed in my son’s third-grade class like kids in other countries talk about what they’ll be when they grow up,” Matti writes—I wonder how we will see ourselves out of the tunnel.