January 15, 2025

The Terrible Déjà Vu of an Israel-Hamas Hostage Deal

Will Israel never learn?

For the past 15 months, Israel has fought with brilliance and tenacity to crush Hamas and ensure that an unspeakable atrocity like the one the terrorist group unleashed on Oct. 7, 2023, never recurs. Yet now it is on the point of making a grievous blunder — of repeating a grievous blunder — that all but guarantees that more Israelis will be killed, maimed, and abducted in future atrocities.

According to multiple news accounts based on information from negotiators meeting in Qatar, Hamas and Israel are close to finalizing a deal for the release of some of the hostages, nearly all of them civilians, who have been held in Gaza for more than 460 days. Under the agreement’s reported terms, 33 of the 98 hostages still in Hamas captivity (not all of them alive) would be freed in exchange for a six-week cease-fire and the release of an estimated 1,300 Palestinian security prisoners, including as many as 200 who are serving life sentences for murder. Negotiations to return additional Israeli hostages would begin during the third week of the cease-fire.

The proposed agreement would also require Israeli forces to withdraw from the narrow buffer zone that separates Gaza from Egypt. For years leading up to Oct. 7, Hamas smuggled enormous quantities of weapons, ammunition, construction material, and personnel into Gaza by building tunnels across the corridor. As recently as Dec. 25, 2024, Israel’s defense minister insisted that Jerusalem would never permit Hamas to regain control of the corridor.

All of which means that if this deal is approved, it is a certainty that Israeli hostages will remain in Gaza’s dungeons and that hundreds of Palestinian militants — including many with blood on their hands — will return to the fight. Despite everything Israel has done to destroy Hamas’s infrastructure and decapitate its leadership, it will remain a deadly foe capable of plotting further atrocities.

Will Israel never learn?

On numerous occasions in the past, Israeli governments have agreed to similarly lopsided exchanges with terrorist organizations like Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Palestine Liberation Organization. Time and again, Israel has paid for the freedom of a few hostages or prisoners of war, or sometimes just their remains, by releasing hundreds of violent prisoners, many of them responsible for the deaths of civilians. Time and again, the newly freed terrorists have picked up where they left off.

In May 1985, after nearly a year of negotiation, Israel agreed to release 1,150 Palestinian prisoners convicted of murder and other security offenses in exchange for three Israeli soldiers held by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a notorious terror group. Among those released was a Muslim Brotherhood operative named Ahmed Yassin, who had served less than two years of a 13-year sentence for unlawfully stockpiling weapons and establishing jihadist cells. Once freed, Yassin resumed his terrorist activity. In 1987 he launched Hamas for the purpose of exterminating Israel and carrying out the mass murder of Jews.

In October 2011, to bring home a kidnapped soldier named Gilad Shalit, Israel let 1,027 security prisoners walk free. Among those released were two notorious Palestinian terrorists, Yahya Sinwar and Rawhi Mushtaha. Sinwar went on to become Hamas’s senior commander and Mushtaha his top lieutenant; together they planned the horrific events of Oct. 7.

By agreeing to let murderous and implacable enemies like Yassin, Sinwar, and Mushtaha go free, in other words, Israel has repeatedly paved the way for more innocent victims to be killed, tortured, and traumatized. Now it seems ready to do so again — and most Israelis are fine with that. Not because they are unaware of the devil’s bargain they are striking, but because the moral obligation and emotional yearning to redeem captives is so deeply entrenched in the psyche of the Jewish state that for most Israelis, every other consideration pales in importance.

An opinion survey released this week finds that 64 percent of Israelis support releasing even terrorists with “blood on their hands” if that is the price of bringing hostages home.

Would they feel that way if they knew in advance exactly which innocent victims would lose their lives, limbs, or liberty at the hands of the violent prisoners to be exchanged for (some of) the hostages? Does the moral obligation to redeem captives require Israel to, in effect, condemn innumerable others to death — or fates worse than death?

On Monday, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, one of the few high-ranking Israeli officials to condemn the impending agreement, called it “a catastrophe.” He is right. The way to bring home the hostages is to achieve the goal Israel’s leaders have repeatedly articulated — a total victory over Hamas culminating in its unconditional surrender. Another wholesale release of prisoners will not speed such a victory but prevent it. It will mean new pain, loss, and grief. And it will guarantee that this terrible war, which has already cost Jews and Arabs so much, will cost them even more.

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