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This Israel-Hamas Deal Sets a Dangerous Precedent
(Wall Street Journal) Amit Segal - In 2012, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu received a report from a former president of the Supreme Court aimed at preventing Israel from paying exorbitant ransoms in exchange for its captives and hostages abducted by terrorists. The recommendations weren't enacted into law. Over the years, 48 Israelis have been killed in military operations to free hostages. Netanyahu sustained a bullet wound while freeing a hijacked Sabena airplane in 1972. His brother Yonatan was killed four years later in an operation which successfully freed more than 100 hostages from Palestinian hijackers at Entebbe International Airport in Uganda. In recent years, Israel has begun to pay increasingly exorbitant prices for its hostages. Once it refused to negotiate with terrorists; today it does. In the hostage deal of January 2025, for the first time in history, a state is paying a strategic price on the battlefield for the return of its citizens. Not only are murderers who killed hundreds of men, women and children about to be released, but now the IDF is also withdrawing from northern Gaza, which it conquered at the expense of more than 100 lives. How did this happen? A combination of factors contributed to the lopsided hostage deal: President Biden was determined to bring an end to the war at any price - war that had cost the Democratic Party during an election year. Netanyahu, in the face of crushing public pressure, needed to bring the hostages home. Trump was eager to prove that he could succeed where his predecessor failed. Seeing the hostages at home fills the heart with joy. No words can capture the profound relief at seeing men, women, children and the elderly brought home from Hamas's terror tunnels. Yet we must not forget the devastating price extracted. The writer is chief political commentator on Israel's Channel 12 News.