Hostages can be terribly mistreated […]; they have no intrinsic value to their abductors but they have […] a real extrinsic value. Terrorists tend to consider them so low as being dehumanized while the outside world may highly prize their life as human beings and sometimes as symbols. In other words, the hostage's value is a double-value that may, on occasion, lead terrorists to kill their victims. But there is a limitation because killing them would be destroying the possibility of gains, which was the very purpose of the hostage-taking