Once in a while, something goes right in this world

 This:

Israeli forces rescued four hostages held by Hamas since October in a raid in Gaza on Saturday that Palestinian officials said killed more than 200 people, one of the single bloodiest Israeli assaults of the eight-month-old war.

The hostage rescue operation and an intense accompanying air assault took place in central Gaza's al-Nuseirat, a densely built-up and often embattled area in the conflict between Israel and Hamas, the Palestinian territory's ruling Islamist group.

The Times of Israel called it 

one of the most daring, complex, high-risk yet successful operations amid the war against Hamas, rescuing four hostages alive from the terror group’s captivity in the Gaza Strip. The mission was conducted in broad daylight and in an area where Israeli forces had not previously operated.

About civilian misfortune, the IDF had this to say:

The IDF acknowledged that it killed Palestinian civilians amid the fighting, but it placed the blame on Hamas for holding hostages and fighting in a dense civilian environment.

“We know about under 100 [Palestinian] casualties. I don’t know how many of them are terrorists,” IDF Spokesman Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari said in a briefing with journalists, reported by Reuters.

Yeah, it behooves us to cast a gimlet eye on Hamas-supplied figures:

The proportion of Palestinian women and children being killed in the Israel-Hamas war appears to have declined sharply, an Associated Press analysis of Gaza Health Ministry data has found, a trend that both coincides with Israel’s changing battlefield tactics and contradicts the ministry’s own public statements.

The trend is significant because the death rate for women and children is the best available proxy for civilian casualties in one of the 21st century’s most destructive conflicts. In October, when the war began, it was above 60%. For the month of April, it was below 40%. Yet the shift went unnoticed for months by the U.N. and much of the media, and the Hamas-linked Health Ministry has made no effort to set the record straight.

But it's not like there are a lot of unopinionated people in Gaza:

Palestinian support for Hamas in the West Bank and Gaza remains high, according to a Palestinian poll released on March 20. That support has increased since the Iran-backed terrorist group attacked Israel on October 7. The poll, published by the Ramallah-based non-profit Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research, also indicates that Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas and his faction have grown even more unpopular since the war in Gaza started.

I'll reiterate: all this agony could come to an end yet this afternoon if Hamas would do two things: release the hostages and dismantle itself.