RUTHFULLY YOURS

“The terrorist dream team” is how Avi Dichter, then head of Shin Bet, Israel’s internal security agency, described the guest list at the time. Mr. Dichter, Gen. Gallant and other Israeli security officials in the 2003 war room plunged into hours of debate about what size bomb to drop in Gaza, weighing the risks of civilian casualties.

Palestinian children were playing outside the home. It was “a tragic dilemma,” one general said, a lose-lose decision of the sort they had argued and anguished over many times before. Mr. Dichter advocated for an all-out assault. The defense minister at the time called it “a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.” In the long run, several argued, it would save Israeli and Palestinian lives.

Inside the Gaza home, Hamas’s political chief, Ismail Haniyeh, was spooning rice onto the plate of Sheik Ahmed Yassin, Hamas’s spiritual founder, when the Israeli air force F-16 released its ordinance onto the roof. The explosion shook the dining room, Mr. Haniyeh told me afterward. Dust rained down from the ceiling. He looked up.

“We are hit, Sheik,” Mr. Haniyeh said, laughing bitterly.

But at the last minute, the Israelis had replaced the 1-ton lethal payload with a quarter-ton bomb. They wanted to spare civilians. The smaller bomb, Israeli officials concluded, was a moral and public-opinion imperative. The government’s legitimacy depended on domestic and international support and sympathy. All eight Hamas leaders fled the house, alive.

When I asked Gen. Gallant about the decision to replace the 1-ton bomb, he seethed: “You either attack or you don’t.”

“Three moral successes don’t equal one operational success,” Mr. Dichter said, rapping the edge of his desk with his wedding band. He is now Israel’s agricultural minister. “We failed. Period.”

Today, Mr. Deif commands Hamas’s military wing, the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam brigades. An Israeli general who took part in the 2003 ordinance debate and is now serving in the government said in a recent interview that his daughter’s best friend was murdered by Hamas at the music festival. “We made a mistake,” he said, voice heavy with sorrow. “We should have killed them.”

A second spectral mistake chasing Israel’s war cabinet is Yahya Sinwar, Hamas’s Gaza leader. The Israel Defense Forces now identify him as “the face of evil.” Together with Mr. Deif, Mr. Sinwar is believed to have masterminded the Oct. 7 massacre. In 2011 Mr. Netanyahu exchanged more than 1,000 Palestinian convicts for a single Israeli soldier, Gilad Shalit. The swap included Mr. Sinwar. The uneven 2011 deal, the prime minister’s detractors say, inspired Hamas’s hostage-taking operation last month, an effort to empty Israel’s security prisons again.

Hostage negotiations are especially vexing for Mr. Netanyahu, given his family history. While freeing Jewish hostages at Entebbe in 1976, his brother Yoni was killed at age 30. His mother, Cela, once showed me Yoni’s letters, chess set and dented dog tags. She sat alone on a Friday evening in the Jerusalem home where she had raised her sons. Proud of Yoni’s life, she saw futility in his death.

“I was angry. What for?” Cela said looking back some 20 years after the Entebbe rescue mission. Why had the Israeli government refused to negotiate with the hijackers who were seeking the release of 53 prisoners? “Thousands of prisoners are released today. For that, Yoni had to be killed? It wasn’t worth it.”

Today Benjamin Netanyahu says there will be “no cease-fire without the release of our hostages.” Civilian casualties are painfully high, and rising. Mr. Netanyahu has set a stiff military objective: total elimination of Hamas, with Messrs. Deif and Sinwar as top targets. Israel had both years ago and let them go. They’re now in Gaza, underground, almost certainly laughing. There is no light at the end of Hamas tunnels. And no end to regret until they’re dead.

Ms. Blumenfeld is a senior fellow at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and author of “Revenge: A Story of Hope.”