Sorry to spoil the party, but there’s one aspect of this week’s Middle East peace deal which is pure madness.
As part of the US-brokered ceasefire in Gaza, Israel is set to free 250 Palestinian terrorists serving lengthy prison sentences for murder and other serious offenses. Many of them have boasted of their crimes and said they would happily carry them out again. (Up to 1,700 Hamas fighters captured during the current war are also set to be freed, but may be worth releasing if this deal brings an end to the war.)
This kind of terrible deal-making will surely only encourage the future kidnapping of other innocent people by terrorists in order to secure the release of other murderers
Israelis can be brilliant at many things. But sometimes they get it very wrong. From the outset, it has been foolish for Israeli negotiators (and later President Trump’s envoy Steve Witkoff) to even entertain the idea that they will release convicted mass murderers and suicide bomb planners in exchange for innocent Israeli kidnap victims.
To take one example: Mahmoud Qawasmeh, a 45-year-old senior Hamas member who was previously released during the lopsided 2011 Gilad Shalit terrorist-for-hostage exchange. He then went on to orchestrate the 2014 kidnapping and murder of three Israeli teenagers, for which he was re-arrested only last year in March. He is due to be released under the new Trump plan.
What are the bets that in future Qawasmeh will go on to murder again and be arrested a third time (probably after hiding in some UN-affiliated hospital) and then released yet again in some future lopsided hostages for terrorists deal?
Another terrorist slated to be released this week is Imad Qawasmeh, currently serving 16 life sentences for organising a double suicide bus bombing in which killed 16 Israelis were killed and over 100 injured in 2004 in the southern city of Beersheba. Among the victims was a three-and-a-half-year-old boy killed while sitting on his mother’s lap. (Twenty-thousand Hamas supporters in Gaza took to the streets to celebrate that attack the next day, according to Reuters.)
Then there is Morad Bader Abdullah Adais, a 25-year-old Palestinian convicted of stabbing to death Daphna Meir, a 39-year-old Israeli mother of six, with a kitchen knife. After the murder, he allegedly returned home to calmly watch a film with his family.
Next up is Hilmi Abdul Karim Muhammad Hammash: sentenced for coordinating a Jerusalem suicide bus bombing in 2004 that killed 11 Israelis and wounded 50 others.
It is not just terrorists from Hamas who are set to be freed. Iyad Abu al-Rub, a terrorist from the even more radial Islamic Jihad group, who was convicted of orchestrating a series of deadly suicide bombings in Israel that killed 13 people between 2003 and 2005, is to be released. The suicide bombs he planned included one at a dance club in Tel Aviv, another at a shopping mall in Netanya, and a third at an outdoor food market in Hadera, north of Tel Aviv.
Of course, I want the hostages held in Gaza to be released. But this kind of terrible deal-making will surely only encourage the future kidnapping of other innocent people by terrorists in order to secure the release of other murderers.
I wrote almost the exact same sentence in 2011 when I criticised the Gilad Shalit deal that, among others, freed Yahya Sinwar, who went on to become the architect of the October 7 massacre. I want peace as much as anybody but releasing murderers for innocent kidnap victims in the absence of a proper commitment to peace by Hamas, is not the way to get there.
As soon as the hostages have been released tomorrow, world leaders, including Keir Starmer, will gather in Cairo under President Trump’s auspices. They must tell Hamas’s backers Qatar and Turkey that Hamas should be happy with peace and prosperity for its own sake and not be rewarded with the freeing of mass murderers.
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