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Previous Asymmetrical Prisoner Exchanges
(Foreign Affairs) Alon Pinkas - In 1983, the Yitzhak Shamir government freed 66 terrorists and 4,500 detainees captured during the 1982 war in Lebanon in return for six soldiers. In 1985, as part of the Jibril deal, the Shimon Peres government released 1,150 prisoners in exchange for eight Israeli soldiers. The 2004 Tannenbaum deal saw the Ariel Sharon government release 436 detainees in exchange for one Israeli reserve officer who was kidnapped by Hizbullah after being lured into a business deal. In 2008, Israel exchanged scores of Lebanese and Palestinian detainees and prisoners for the bodies of two Israeli soldiers, Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev, who were captured during a 2006 Hizbullah ambush on the Israeli-Lebanon border and who died shortly thereafter. The 1,027 prisoners freed for Shalit is asymmetrical but not unusually unbalanced. The writer served as Consul General of Israel in the U.S.