The fact that there are dozens of Americans (probably dual citizens) held hostage by Hamas adds a whole other dimension to this war. It certainly augurs for more direct US involvement. Israel has a history of releasing large numbers of Palestinian prisoners in return for getting a relatively few of its own people back. The pressure on Bibi will be enormous to make concessions and to stop the retaliation before the job is done.
I was thinking about that yesterday when I heard that Israeli forces were searching frantically for the prisoners/kidnapped people and actually found a bunch at one location and rescued them.Problem is we don’t actually know how many they have.