The Hostages’ Last Day in Captivity

By Amit Segal

Hamas is set to start releasing hostages Monday at 6am Israel time—a process that will continue until midday. As for Palestinian murderers in Israeli prisons, per the deal, they’ll only be released once the last Israeli hostage is home.

But there’s one problem: Hamas seems unable to find the bodies of eight or nine dead hostages. And so, what may well happen is that the 39 or 40 hostages whose location is known will be freed, after which Israel will release Palestinian terrorists from its jails.

And there may be another twist: this morning, the Wall Street Journal reported that Hamas told Israel it already has the 20 living Israeli hostages and is ready to begin releasing them today. Jerusalem, however, remains skeptical.

Either way, as desperate as Israelis are for the hostages to come home, many in the Jewish state are distressed, to say the least, by the Palestinian terrorists being released in the deal. Given that it doesn’t receive as much attention as it deserves in Western media, I’ll take this moment to briefly explore some of the nearly 2,000 Palestinians being released from Israeli jails.

Hilmi Abdul Karim Muhammad Hammash, who coordinated a 2004 suicide bombing on a bus in Jerusalem, killing 11 Israelis and wounding 50.

Morad Bader Abdullah Adais. In 2016, he stabbed to death Dafna Meir, a 38-year-old mother to six, in front of her teenage daughter, at the entrance to their home in Otniel.

Jihad A-Karim Azziz Rom. 25 years ago today, IDF reservists Vadim Norzhich and Yosef Avrahami accidentally drove into Ramallah, and were detained by Palestinian Authority police. Once word got out that two Israeli soldiers were at the police station, a crowd gathered outside the station, before eventually breaking in, where they beat and stabbed Norzhich and Avrahami to death.

Azziz Rom participated in the lynching, as well as the kidnapping and murder of 18-year-old Yuri Gushchin in 2001.

Few, if any, Palestinian terror attacks are seared into the Israeli psyche as deeply as the Ramallah lynching, thanks to a TV crew capturing the moment Aziz Salha ran out to proudly show his blood-soaked hands to the Palestinian crowd outside the police station. (An IDF airstrike in Gaza late last year killed Salha.)

That may be shocking enough, but for an even deeper understanding of how gruesome the murder was—and why it’s forever stained into Israelis’ memories—it’s worth reading The Telegraph’s report following the incident: “Two soldiers, held on the first floor, were beaten and stabbed to death.”

Television showed one of the attackers run to the second floor window and make a victory sign and then return to the fray. In the background, several men were seen pounding on something or someone on the floor. The crowd erupted into cheers. The attackers tossed one of the men out of the window, another out the door. One of the soldiers was seen dangling upside down, apparently attached to a rope. The crowd stood below, waving fists and cheering.

The body was dropped into the compound, where the mob stamped on the corpse and beat it with the broken bars of a window grille… At 10.30 the mob dragged the two bodies to Al-Manara Square, the town centre, where an impromptu victory celebration began.”

And those are just three of the prisoners Israel is releasing in order to bring the hostages home.

Tomorrow, G-d willing, Israeli parents, spouses and children will embrace their loved ones once again after 738 days of hell. And somewhere else, the men who tore other families apart will walk out of prison to applause.

That contrast says it all.