A headline on the front page of Monday’s Yediot Aharonot, under a picture of 4-year-old Avigail Idan, who returned from Hamas captivity on Sunday, encapsulates the emotional whiplash Israelis are experiencing.

“Avigal is home, without mom or dad,” the headline read.

The first part of that headline elicits a tremendous sense of joy and gladness: Thank God, after 51 days in the hands of brutal terrorists, little Avigail is home and safe.

But then comes the headline’s dependent clause: “without mom and dad,” and all that joy melts away because of the realization that Avigail is an orphan, her parents murdered by Hamas on October 7 at Kfar Aza.

From the heights of joy to the depths of sorrow in five Hebrew words.

And that sums up what the country has been going through since Friday when some of the hostages started to come home: tremendous happiness at lives reborn; tremendous sadness as some of the hostages, like Avigail, are returning to shattered families and homes.

Tremendous joy for the relatives of those returning; immense sorrow for those whose own relatives continue to languish in Hamas captivity.

Tremendous pride that we live in a land that sanctifies life and is willing to make great sacrifices to ensure it; immense concern that the terrorists Israel released and will be releasing to win the hostages’ return will lead to even more terrorism.

Tremendous relief that the country has—because of the truce—gone a couple of days without the horrid morning ritual of waiting to hear whether any more names of fallen soldiers from the day before have been “cleared for publication”; gut-wrenching anxiety that this ritual will begin again when the fighting restarts.

A typographic poster is making the rounds on Facebook that, quoting from Ecclesiastes, sums up Israel’s emotional landscape right now so well: “‘A time to weep, and a time to laugh … a time to embrace…’ And sometimes, it’s all at once.”

There are tears of joy, and there are tears of sorrow. Generally, however, they are not shed simultaneously by the same person. That is not the case today. Now, the two are commingling: warring sentiments, opposing emotions.

The survivors of Kfar Aza gathered on Sunday in an events hall at Kibbutz Shefayim, where they are staying, to watch together the release Sunday of the 14 hostages, including Avigail and nine others from Kfar Aza.

One woman, a neighbor of both the Brodutch and Almog-Goldstein families—each a family where the mother and three children were returning—could hardly breathe during a Channel 12 interview during which she shed tears of joy that her neighbors were being released, while weeping in sorrow for those of her neighbors either not coming home or killed during the Simchat Torah massacre. Then she let out an emotional cry of “Shema Yisrael” and collapsed into her husband’s chest.

The Emotional Events
Over the Last Several Days

Over the last four days, there have been several tear-inducing images that will forever be engraved in this country’s collective memory.

There was 9-year-old Emily Hand running into the arms of her weeping father when reunited at the hospital. There was the image of 3-year-old Yael Shoham sitting on a van in the dead of night, her little feet nowhere near touching the ground, waiting to be brought back to freedom.

And then there were hundreds of residents from Ofakim, a community that had experienced its own harrowing trauma and lost approximately 50 residents in the October 7 massacres, lining the route that the vans with the released hostages traversed on Sunday night, heading to Hatzerim Air Force Base and then to hospitals. They waved flags, cheered and, in some instances, literally jumped for joy as the vehicles passed carrying the released hostages—people they’ve never met before but with whom they feel an intense bond of solidarity.

If all had gone as planned over the last four days—if all the hostages had been released as agreed in good time without any tricks, delays or manufactured drama—it would still have been a tumultuous emotional journey. But all things did not run like clockwork, something to be expected when dealing with a terrorist organization for whom nothing is sacred, least of all its word.

So the built-in emotional upheaval of the moment was compounded by not knowing for sure when and if the hostage releases would even take place until—as was the case on Saturday and to a lesser degree on Monday—much later than expected. The anxiety born of that uncertainty gripped the nation and frayed its nerves.

Hamas head Yahya Sinwar is obviously aware of the flood of emotions this has unleashed. Sinwar is trying to play on those emotions and capitalize on them. His hope is that in this emotional whirlwind, Israel will lose its compass, be blinded by the emotional upheaval, perhaps crippled by it and give in or give up, saying enough is enough, it’s time to end the war and pay any price, including the price of ending the war, to win the release of the remaining 166 hostages.

But he misreads the mood in Israel. Sinwar thinks that the emotions engendered by the hostage release, together with international pressure, will turn this temporary pause in the war into a complete stop. But he overestimates the power of emotions, because beyond emotions, Israelis—like everyone—are driven by a will to survive, an instinct that compels them to take actions aimed at ensuring that survival.

And most Israelis, even amid the emotional tempest they are currently experiencing, understand now better than ever that to survive in this cruel region, Hamas must be roundly defeated—a goal that has yet to be achieved.