Swords of Iron Day 1057 falls in the dry time of year, when the agriculture desperately needs rain. I have heard a huge downpour may come this weekend, and I hope it marks the start of a new season in more ways than one.
Swords of Iron Day 1057: A Hostage Home, and a Daughter Born
I think of Elkana Bohbot, who spent 738 days in a Hamas tunnel and is now home with his wife Rivka. This week they welcomed a baby daughter, less than a year after his release.
I remember the dust, the diesel, the gunfire and the adrenaline of searching for hostages in Gaza and serving in Lebanon. After all of that, seeing a man come home from a tunnel and then hold a newborn is about as complete an answer to our enemies as exists. They wanted an ending. They got a beginning.
October 7 Is Almost Here Again
But the anniversary is approaching, and with it some hard reading. A U.S. government report has found that more than 100 UNRWA employees took part in the atrocities of October 7. If an agency cannot keep terrorists off its own payroll, it has no business being the guarantor of anything in Gaza or southern Lebanon.
An ISIS-inspired plot inside Israel was also stopped. Prosecutors indicted two Israeli Arabs, a 16-year-old from the Galilee and a 19-year-old from Haifa, after they swore allegiance to ISIS and moved toward attacking police officers and soldiers. If radicalization can happen here, it can happen anywhere. Vigilance is not paranoia; it is maintenance.
Swords of Iron Day 1057: The Peace Process and the Disarmament Question
Gaza, Lebanon, Syria and Iran are all part of the same picture. The future depends heavily on whether Hamas genuinely disarms under President Trump’s 20-point plan and UN Security Council Resolution 2803, which endorses that plan and authorizes an International Stabilization Force tasked with the permanent decommissioning of weapons held by non-state armed groups.
The first steps were returning hostages and ending the fighting. The harder step is disarmament, and it has not happened. Hamas disputes the obligation entirely and claims a right to keep its weapons.
We Have Seen This Movie Before
This feels like déjà vu, and the comparison is not rhetorical. The Oslo Accords in 1993 and 1995 were supposed to create security and stability. Violations continued, weapons accumulated, and terror returned. Israel’s 2005 disengagement from Gaza removed 21 settlements and every soldier, and it did not produce peace either. Hamas built tunnels and weapons factories, won an election, seized the territory by force, and eventually planned October 7.
We cannot repeat that cycle. Every tunnel rebuilt, every weapon brandished, every terrorist infrastructure site restored sets the process backward, no matter what any document says.
Israel has tried to minimize civilian harm, even when doing so made operations slower and more dangerous for our own soldiers. But when terrorist organizations continue operating and international guarantees fail, we have to be clear with ourselves: security cannot be built on promises alone.
Swords of Iron Day 1057: What Genuine Disarmament Would Actually Look Like
Whenever I say disarmament has to come first, people reasonably ask what that means in practice, because the word gets used so loosely that it has almost stopped meaning anything. So here is the plain version.
It means weapons physically handed over and destroyed, not stored, not relabeled, and not moved across a line for safekeeping. It means the tunnel network mapped and demolished rather than sealed at the entrance. It means the workshops and the machine tools that produce rockets taken out of service, because a group that can still manufacture has not disarmed, it has merely paused. It means inspectors who can go where they choose without an escort deciding the route. And it means consequences that are written down in advance, so that a violation triggers something automatic rather than another round of meetings.
None of that is a maximalist Israeli wish list. It is roughly the standard applied anywhere else in the world when a heavily armed non-state group is folded back into a state. The reason it matters here is that we have already run the alternative experiment twice, in 1993 and in 2005, and we know exactly how it ends.
What Three Years of War Teaches You
My body, after almost three years of war, does not want another October 7th. I do not want another tunnel, another drone factory, another missile factory, or another generation raised and prepared for war.
Hope deferred makes the heart sick. That is not despair talking; it is the reason I keep insisting on genuine disarmament and genuine security before rebuilding can succeed. Get the sequence wrong and you are not building peace, you are building the next war more comfortably.
We must also remember the lessons of history, including the Armenian genocide, and recognize the danger of rewriting or denying history while accusing others of atrocities. A world that can be talked out of one genocide can be talked out of another.
Swords of Iron Day 1057 and the God Who Sees
For, lo, he that formeth the mountains, and createth the wind, and declareth unto man what is his thought, that maketh the morning darkness, and treadeth upon the high places of the earth, The LORD, The God of hosts, is his name. (Amos 4:13)
He is the God who sees everything, a warrior who stands to defend His people. On the days when the process looks circular and the guarantees look thin, that is the fact I come back to.
Watch the Full Swords of Iron Day 1057 Update
You can watch the complete Day 1057 briefing on Rumble or on YouTube. For the previous briefing in this series, see Swords of Iron Day 1056, and learn more about the work of the Aliyah Return Center.
Israel is standing. Am Yisrael Chai.
About These Swords of Iron Updates
These daily briefings are written from Israel by the team at the Aliyah Return Center in the Galilee, drawing on Israeli and international reporting alongside first-hand perspective from the ground. Our work centers on welcoming and supporting new immigrants, training ambassadors for Israel, and helping friends of Israel around the world understand what is actually happening here. If you would like to visit, volunteer, or support this work, you can reach us through the Aliyah Return Center website.