Lt.-Col (res.) Maurice Hirsch and Abby Notkin
Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs, July 23, 2025
“Alongside the demand to release the terrorists already convicted, Hamas is also demanding the release of the terrorists who participated in the October 7 massacre and were arrested at the scenes of their atrocities or thereafter.”
Kidnapped during the October 7, 2023, massacre, 50 hostages – 23 of which the Israeli government believes to be alive – have remained in Hamas captivity for close to two years. Israel’s policy is that no hostage, dead or alive, gets left behind. This policy often forces Israel’s government to make any deal possible in exchange for freeing the hostages from the hands of the genocidal terrorists.
In response to terrorist demands during hostage negotiations, Israel is often required – among other concessions – to release convicted terrorists, many of whom are serving long prison sentences. Some of these individuals have been sentenced to multiple life terms for their involvement in planning and carrying out numerous terror attacks.
The released terrorists are not reformed or rehabilitated by the sentences they served. Rather, most of them return to terror. During discussions of the Israeli Cabinet prior to the last deal, the head of the Israel Security Agency noted that, of the 1,027 terrorists released in the 2011 deal to secure the release of IDF soldier Gilad Shalit, 82 percent returned to terror. Included in this statistic was Yahya Sinwar, the architect of the October 7 massacre.
In the tumult and drive to secure the release of the hostages, there is much discussion around the number of terrorists Israel would be forced to release. The “dry” numbers conceal not only the identities of the terrorists and the heinous acts for which they were arrested, convicted, and punished, but also the identity of their victims. … [To read the full article, click here]