Israel Bombs Last American Hostage After Trumps' Efforts to Release Him

As long as the Palestinian people refuse to submit to being ethnically-cleansed, Israel insists no life—Palestinian, Americans, or Israeli—will be spared.

Former US president Donald Trump poses for photos with family members of Edan Alexander. October 7, 2024, in New York. (AP Photo/Yuki Iwamura)

Hamas has lost contact with the unit guarding Edan Alexander—the only remaining American-Israeli soldier held captive in Gaza—after Israel launched a direct airstrike on the location where he was being held. Is anyone surprised Israel may have knowingly done this a few days after he appeared in a video lambasting Netanyahu and urging Trump not to listen to him?

“I truly believe we will return home dead. There is no hope. Every day I see Netanyahu controls the state like a dictator,” Alexander said defiantly in the video, despite not a single mainstream news organization covering his desperate words.

The location was directly targeted by an Israeli airstrike, Abu Obeida, Al Qassam Brigade’s spokesperson, said. Whether Alexander is dead or alive remains unclear.

Obeida did not reveal where Alexander was being held. But later, the group issued a chilling warning to the families of Israeli hostages: “Your children will return in black coffins, their bodies ripped apart by your army’s shrapnel.”

Alexander’s release had been a key focus of negotiations last month between Hamas officials and U.S. envoy Adam Boehler. Though Hamas freed 38 hostages during a ceasefire that began on January 19, the truce collapsed when Israel resumed its military onslaught in March, after Hamas refused to extend the deal without a halt to the war.

Netanyahu reportedly panicked when Trump’s team opened a direct line with Hamas to negotiate the release of Alexander.

Now, it seems Israel may have deliberately struck the very location where Alexander was being held. This raises renewed concerns about its quiet but deadly use of the so-called Hannibal Directive — a military protocol that, in practice, prioritizes denying captors the political leverage of live hostages… even if it means killing those hostages.

Could Israel be systematically eliminating hostages with dual citizenship to rid itself of international pressure? It’s a twisted kind of logic: if there are no hostages left, then there’s no need to negotiate. No reason to stop the bombs. No accountability.

Trump, predictably, called for Alexander’s release—yet said nothing of the hundreds of Palestinian children held in Israeli prisons. Selective empathy is a cornerstone of American foreign policy, after all.

According to the NYT, the Trump administration engaged in a last-ditch effort in March to secure Alexander’s release ahead of Trump’s address to a joint session of Congress. The negotiations were still underway as Trump arrived at the Capitol on March 5. When the talks failed to yield a breakthrough, the president referenced the hostages only briefly during his speech.

Since October 7th, Israel has killed scores of its own citizens in Gaza. There’s mounting evidence — and a grim consistency — suggesting these deaths weren’t just collateral damage, but part of an official doctrine designed to prevent Hamas from gaining leverage, even if it comes at the cost of Israeli lives.

Meanwhile in the U.S., on the third night of Passover, hundreds of Jewish Americans—members of Jewish Voice for Peace—gathered outside ICE headquarters in New York, not to celebrate, but to protest.

They weren’t chanting about matzah or miracles. They were there to denounce the very real, very modern plague of arrests and deportations targeting pro-Palestinian voices. While U.S. politicians toast to democracy and denounce authoritarianism abroad, they’re enabling censorship and criminalization at home.

Their protest was a demand for something we are taught is a universal right: the right to speak the truth. But what happens when the truth is buried beneath rubble, wiped out in the blink of a drone strike, or dismissed as propaganda?

When Names Disappear from Headlines

In Rafah, Gaza, an entire family was just erased. Nine members of the Qeshta family—mother, father, six children, and a relative—killed in an Israeli airstrike. Their names —Ashraf, Manal, Shahd, Maria, Aya, Maha, Eman, Taher, Suleiman — like thousands of others before them, may vanish from headlines within hours. But to those still clinging to life in Gaza, they are not statistics. They are reminders. Evidence. Proof of what happens when the world lets Israel carry out its war of extermination unchecked.

The Illusion of a Ceasefire

Hamas has reportedly received a revised ceasefire proposal—one that includes a temporary 45-day pause in fighting, the release of half the remaining captives, and the entry of humanitarian aid. But notably absent? A permanent end to the war. A red line, Hamas says. And whether or not you agree with their politics or their tactics, one thing remains irrefutable: so long as there is occupation, there will be resistance. As Sami Abu Zuhri, head of Hamas’s political bureau abroad, put it, “The demand to disarm the resistance is not up for discussion… these weapons exist to protect our people and our national rights.”

Resistance in the Face of Erasure

The American media loves to decontextualize resistance. It thrives on binaries: good versus evil, victims versus terrorists. But what if we asked harder questions? What if we understood that those who pick up arms in Gaza do so not out of bloodlust but out of desperation, legacy, and memory? What if we remembered that occupation is not just checkpoints and airstrikes—it’s the theft of childhood, the colonization of dreams, and the daily humiliation of an entire people?

In Gaza, resistance is not a choice—it’s the only thing that remains when the world forgets you exist.

Most of Gaza is now either erased or completely unlivable—flattened into a “no-go zone” or smothered beneath Israeli-issued displacement orders. This is not security. This is not self-defense. This is systematic destruction. Even former Mossad chiefs and Israeli military officials now concede what so many of us have been shouting into the void for months: Netanyahu should end his “political” war and bring the remaining hostages home.

Netanyahu’s war is not about hostages—it’s about power, impunity, and avoiding prison. But every day this war continues, Israel inches further from democracy and deeper into pariah status. The choice is clear, and history is watching: a ceasefire now, a hostage release, and a political path toward Palestinian statehood—not as a favor, but as a necessity for survival, for justice, and for the future of both peoples.