In February 1862, Union troops commanded by General Ulysses S. Grant attacked Fort Donelson, a major Confederate position. When the officer commanding the fort realized he could not prevail, he sent word to Grant offering to discuss a surrender. To his astonishment, Grant refused to negotiate.

“No terms except unconditional and immediate surrender can be accepted,” Grant replied. “I propose to move immediately upon your works.”

That terse battlefield reply made Grant a national hero, and it foreshadowed the war’s final outcome, when General Robert E. Lee surrendered his army to Grant at Appomattox Court House in Virginia.

During World War II, the Allies adopted Grant’s position. At the Casablanca Conference in 1943, President Franklin D. Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill declared that the war could end only with the “unconditional surrender” of the Axis powers.

Some conflicts end through negotiation. But with some enemies, the only acceptable defeat is unconditional defeat. The slaveholding American South was such an enemy. So were Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. And so is Hamas, the genocidal terrorist regime in Gaza that unleashed such savagery on Israel on Oct. 7.

It has been more than 10 months since waves of Hamas-organized killers launched an unprovoked invasion of southern Israel, slaughtering nearly 1,200 Israelis and kidnapping 251 hostages. In the war that erupted that day, Israel has frequently reiterated that total victory over Hamas is the goal.

Yet even as the war proceeds, Israel is engaged in negotiations with Hamas to secure the release of hostages, 109 of whom are still in captivity. On Sunday, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, in the region for the ninth time since Oct. 7, pressed Israel’s leaders to seize what he called “maybe the last opportunity” to negotiate a cease-fire and the hostages’ release. On Monday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu accepted the latest American proposal. But Hamas has already rejected it, which means pressure on Israel’s leaders to make ever-deeper concessions in order to get its hostages back will continue.

Much of that pressure is internal: Nearly two-thirds of Israelis are in favor of a hostage deal along the lines being discussed. That means they support the release of up to 1,000 Palestinian prisoners convicted of terrorist activity and other security offenses. At least 100 of those prisoners are murderers serving life sentences. Everyone in Israel knows the price being demanded is steep. But so all-consuming is the national yearning to bring the hostages home, and so intense the empathy for the suffering of their families, that most Israelis are prepared to accept even exorbitant terms in order to end the pain.

But a hostage deal won’t end the pain for long. It will only guarantee more of it.

Over the decades, Jerusalem has repeatedly agreed to release scores, hundreds, even thousands of terrorists and jihadist prisoners to buy the freedom of a handful of Israeli captives — or, in many cases, the return of their corpses. By now the pattern is so well established that Israel’s enemies take it for granted. “What we have in our hands,” a top Hamas official gloated to Al Jazeera on Oct. 7, “will release all our prisoners.” Last November, Israel agreed to a temporary cease-fire and the freeing of 240 Palestinian terrorists in order to bring 105 hostages home. Now Hamas demands another 1,000 militants be turned loose as the price of freeing the remaining Israeli captives.

Israel is a democracy. If a majority of its citizens are prepared to support such lopsided deals, then it’s all but certain Israel’s government will comply.

Yet it is also all but certain that the result will be more innocent Israelis killed, wounded, and kidnapped in future atrocities — atrocities carried out by some of the very terrorists Israel releases. That has been the outcome of every such deal Israel has agreed to in the past.

In 1985, for example, the Jewish state set 1,150 Palestinian security prisoners free in exchange for three Israeli captives. Dozens of those freed prisoners returned to terrorist activity. Among them was a Muslim Brotherhood activist named Ahmed Yassin, who founded Hamas a few months later, launching an unimaginable train of slaughter and savagery.

In 2011, to liberate a kidnapped soldier named Gilad Shalit, Israel released 1,027 imprisoned terrorists. Among them were two prominent Palestinian murderers, Yahya Sinwar and Rawhi Mushtaha. Today Sinwar is Hamas’s senior commander and Mushtaha (until he was killed last month) was among his closest confidants. The Oct. 7 nightmare, in other words, was planned by terrorists who were released in the Shalit deal. Israel was overjoyed when Shalit was freed, but the price of that freedom has been unspeakable: thousands of Israelis murdered, raped, and kidnapped, to say nothing of the tens of thousands of Palestinian lives lost in the current fighting.

Israel will never have peace as long as it keeps negotiating such deals. The only terms Hamas should be offered are unconditional surrender. As Israel and its allies must know by now, anything less will mean more horror and bloodshed, for Jews and Arabs alike.