RUTHFULLY YOURS

Once found, many expect Israel to dispatch Mr. Sinwar with haste. But what if he were captured alive, brought back to Jerusalem, and put on trial like Adolf Eichmann more than 60 years ago?

Eichmann, a high-ranking Nazi SS officer, was the primary organizer of the mass murder of millions of Jews, a task he appeared to relish. At the end of the war he was captured by U.S. forces, but he escaped and changed his identity. In 1950, with the help of Catholic Bishop Alois Hudal, he escaped to Argentina.

A decade later, Mossad agents confirmed that Eichmann was leading a quiet life near Buenos Aires, working as a factory foreman and taking public transportation to and from work every day. It would have been much easier for Israeli agents to kill this monster quietly on a dark street and be on their way. It certainly would have been justified.

But Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion understood that only 15 years after the gas chambers shut down, the world and Israel itself needed to hear exactly what had happened to the Jews of Europe from 1933 to 1945.

Ben-Gurion saw that young Israelis, who were raised to be fiercely proud of their Jewish identity and willing to defend it, had begun to think of Holocaust victims as weak and didn’t understand the degrading system the Nazis used to exterminate millions of Jews. Ben-Gurion even delayed Eichmann’s trial to wait for television to come into operation in Israel so the entire country would be able to watch.

Mossad captured Eichmann alive in 1960 and brought him back to Israel on an El Al plane—no easy feat. Israel was condemned by much of the world for a governmental kidnapping of a foreigner, notwithstanding his horrific past.

The prime minister’s gamble paid off nevertheless. The 1961 trial drew hundreds of reporters and the world watched as witness after witness described in excruciating detail what it was like to arrive in packed boxcars at Auschwitz, Treblinka or Buchenwald with their families and children. Witnesses told heartbreaking stories of standing in long lines waiting to be separated from their loved ones for the last time. Able-bodied men were sent to the right to work as slave laborers; the elderly, young and women were sent to the left, directly to the gas chambers.

As they listened, all eyes were drawn to Eichmann, a nondescript man sitting in a glass booth, squirming at times, his mouth twitching, as he was forced to hear these accounts.

A similar trial with Mr. Sinwar in the glass booth would give his victims of Oct. 7 an opportunity to confront this man and tell the world stories of the horrors he oversaw. It would also demonstrate Israel’s adherence to international law. One criticism of Israel in the Eichmann trial was that the defendant hadn’t technically committed any crime in Israel itself. This certainly isn’t the case with Mr. Sinwar, who was already tried in an Israeli court and convicted in 1989 for the abduction and killing of two Israeli soldiers and four Palestinians. He received four life sentences but was released in 2011 with more than a thousand other prisoners in exchange for one kidnapped Israeli soldier, Gilad Shalit.

Protesters around the world and especially on college campuses have supported and even glorified the Oct. 7 attacks. They should also be forced to hear what happened that day from the survivors, especially the women who were raped by Hamas terrorists. The world should hear what happened to the old people and the babies. The world should be able to judge the small man in the glass booth who perpetrated these disgusting crimes. Then the world might finally understand what really happened.

Mr. Kozak is author of the forthcoming book “Waving Goodbye: Life After Loss.”