There was a grim inevitability that the hunt for Naftali Fraenkel, Gilad Shaer and Eyal Yifrach would eventually become a hunt for their murderers. But the news was no less gut-wrenching for being expected.

Some crimes are so shocking that they move beyond the usual confines of outrage. This was one such. It seems clear that it was an intended kidnapping that went wrong, but even had it been 'successful' as a kidnapping it would have exposed to the world the mindset that drives Hamas. These people do not want peace. They are committed by their founding charter to the genocide of the Jews. They rejoice in death. And yet even before their victims' bodies were buried the usual suspects were finding ways to blame those victims - essentially for the crime of being Israeli. One of those victims was also an American citizen - murdered by operatives of the terrorist organisation which had just a few weeks before been recognised by President Obama as an appropriate leadership of the Palestinian Authority. Something has, to put it mildly, gone very wrong with US foreign policy. But such issues of state and policy are not what matter now. At the moment, all that really matters is that three families are now bereft of cherished sons. The implications of the past three weeks' events are for later.