Because reasons.
Jerusalem, February 19 – Israel’s prime minister reassured his citizenry today that the current deal to exchange imprisoned terrorists for hostages now in terrorist custody in Gaza will work out fine, as opposed to every single previous such deal with Hamas and its analogs in the history of the country, which only resulted in further bloodshed, because reasons.
Binyamin Netanyahu, whose government agreed to a 2011 deal with Hamas that secured the release of a captive soldier in exchange for more than a thousand Palestinian terrorists, promised that this time, unlike that time and all the times before it, the freed terrorists will, by yet some as-yet-unexplained process, not return to violence against jews and Israelis, just trust him.
The current ceasefire arrangement with Hamas, which governs the Gaza Strip, calls for several batches of prisoners in Israel – terrorists convicted of perpetrating or fomenting attacks on Israel – numbering nearly two thousand to go free, while Hamas will release thirty-three of the 250 hostages they captured on October 7, 2023 during a murderous rampage through southern Israel. After previous rescue operations and other negotiated releases, a total of about seventy living and dead hostages remain in Hamas hands.
“This time will be different,” Netanyahu insisted, offering little in the way of evidence.
Analysts surmised that perhaps Netanyahu and the security and political officials in his inner circle assume that the new, staunchly-pro-Israel attitude of the Trump administration will help Israel take measures to prevent a recurrence of that October 7 or of previous kidnap operations – one of which sparked a war with Hezbollah in Lebanon in 2006 – but that remains in the realm of speculation.
“Without a firm plan on either side of the Atlantic, I see little more than wishful thinking,” acknowledged John Bolton, a former US Ambassador to the UN, among other senior postings. “And, well, wishful thinking perfectly sums up Israel’s approach to the entire conflict with the Palestinians – a problem on both sides of that conflict, I might add. But at least Israel has one person where the buck is supposed to stop.”
“Hoping the Hamas-led Palestinians will simply give up eventually has basically characterized the entire approach of every Israeli government since at least Rabin,” added commentator Douglas Murray. “Of course the converse is true from the Palestinian side, with each party laboring under its own delusions of outlasting the other. Perhaps Netanyahu and company think that Trump’s talk of population transfer might move things in a different direction, but that’s not happening anytime soon – but Hamas reasserting itself has already happened, and don’t let all the destruction in Gaza fool you: they consider this a success. A success they intend to repeat.”
A spokesman for the Office of the Prime Minister downplayed such concerns. “It’s not like voters have an alternative.”
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