The fabled international community, including even Ursula von der Leyen, Kaja Kallas and David Lammy, seem to have finally reached the point of "twenty-one months of genocide were fine, but we draw the line at twenty-two", and yet they still can't bring themselves to just directly demand that Israel stop what they're doing without the "Hamas must release all hostages" qualification. This was Lammy trotting out the standard formulation a couple of days ago -
"We need an immediate ceasefire now, the release of all hostages and a surge in aid."
It would of course be a good thing if the remaining hostages were freed, but insisting on always giving that objective joint top billing is highly problematical in a number of ways -
* It sounds very much like a condition or a prerequisite for a ceasefire, ie. Israel can say "you were only calling on us to stop mass-killing people if Hamas released the hostages, and they haven't, so we're good to continue".
* The subtext feeds into the narrative of "this all started on 7th October", thus giving some succour to the idea that Israel's genocide was semi-justified in response to the Hamas attacks. Why not add in a further clause to make it "We need an immediate ceasefire now, the release of all hostages, an end to the illegal Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories, and a surge in aid"? Lammy would probably say that the end of the occupation is a completely separate issue - in other words he doesn't want to admit that the problem can be directly traced back to 1967 (and ultimately to 1948), rather than to October 2023.
* It effectively accords far less proportionate worth to each Palestinian slaughtered than it does to each Israeli hostage. There are thought to be around 23 remaining hostages, compared to at least tens of thousands of Palestinian dead (and it would be a brave person who doubts that the true death toll is way, way over 100,000). To give parity of esteem to those two issues seems almost obscene. It used to be said that one Israeli life was deemed to have the same worth as 1000 Palestinian lives, but now it's even worse than that - simply denying liberty to one Israeli citizen seems to be considered a graver crime than massacring 1000 Palestinian women and children.
* By implication, it denies the hostage status of the Palestinian "administrative detainees" held captive by Israel without charge, and it certainly accords less urgency to their freedom than it does to the far smaller number of Israelis still held by Hamas. "Only Israelis can be hostages, Palestinians can only be prisoners or detainees."