5,000 Palestinian prisoners in exchange for the 240 Israeli hostages.
It is not the first time that an Israeli government has faced a similar dilemma, although never on the magnitude of this occasion.
Hamas has put the offer on the table and Benjamin Netanyahu’s executive is under increasing pressure – especially from the families of those kidnapped – to accept it.
But, if at other times successive Israeli governments have been willing to free thousands of prisoners in exchange for a single hostage (or even in exchange for the corpse of an Israeli soldier), today the situation does not seem so clear.
Netanyahu has promised the families that Israel will “exhaust every possibility to bring them home.” However, he has not committed, at least publicly, to accepting the trade.
Hamas kidnapped more than 200 people on October 7, when its militants entered Israeli territory and killed about 1,400 people, according to Israeli authorities. The vast majority were civilians, as were the hostages.
The number of kidnapped people has been growing as the weeks have passed and has been updated as the intelligence services collected information and the foreigners who were also captured by Hamas were counted.
According to the latest count from the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), at least 245 people They were taken hostage, including 33 children. Some 145 are foreigners or have dual nationality, 15 of whom are Argentine.
To date, Hamas has freed 4 of them, all women, and the Israeli army has rescued a kidnapped female soldier, so At least 240 captives would remain in Gaza.
The feeling among many of the relatives is that the ground operation that the Israeli army has initiated in the Gaza Strip and the heavy aerial bombardments, in which more than 8,000 Palestinians have already died, including more than 3,000 children, according to the Strip’s Health Ministry makes it difficult to rescue their loved ones.
According to Hamas, about 50 hostages have died as a result of the bombings, although it has not provided evidence of this.
He has, however, shared a video in which three of the kidnapped women can be seen, asking for their release. Netanyahu has called the video “cruel propaganda.”
How many Palestinian prisoners are there in Israel?
“We are ready to carry out an immediate prisoner exchange that includes all Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails in exchange for prisoners held captive by the Palestinian resistance,” Hamas leader in the Gaza Strip, Yahia Sinwar, said in a statement. a statement.
But how many are these prisoners and for what crimes are they convicted?
In different appeals, different Hamas leaders have put the number of prisoners whose release they want in exchange for the hostages at 6,000.
The UN puts that number at around 5,000, including 160 children, according to the report that the Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territory occupied since 1967, Francesca Albanese, presented last June.
Of those 5,000, about 1,100 are detained without charge or without having been tried.
According to the Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories, B’Tselem, at the end of June of this year, the Israeli Prison Service was housing 4,499 Palestinians for “security” reasons, and another 850 for being illegally in Israel.
This digit has practically doubled since the Hamas attack on October 7, according to the Palestinian Commission for Detainee Affairs, which estimated more than 10,000 detainees.
In recent weeks, according to Qadura Fares, president of the organization, Israeli security forces have arrested some 4,000 Gaza workers who were in Israel when the war startedand those it keeps in military bases, and has detained more than a thousand people in raids in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.
Who advocates for the exchange
Hamas has made the proposal and, for the moment, the main pressure to accept the deal comes from a large number of hostage families, who have urged Netanyahu’s government to agree to release the prisoners in exchange for their loved ones. .
The relatives seek to keep the hostages very present in the army’s decisions, and have even raised a protest camp in front of the Defense Ministry headquarters in Tel Avivfrom where they seek to pressure the government.
A pressure group for the release of the hostages, the Forum of Families of Hostages and Missing Persons, was formed just 24 hours after the attack.
“As far as the families are concerned, an agreement in which our relatives are returned immediately in the framework of an ‘all for all’ is feasible, and would have broad national support,” said Melrav Gonen, one of the representatives of the families, and whose daughter Roni is kidnapped by Hamas, quoted by AP.
It’s not the only one. Ifat Kalderon, who has a cousin in Hamas hands, also supported the exchange: “take them, we don’t need them. “I want my family and all the hostages to come home, they are citizens, not soldiers,” he told AFP.
It is not, however, a unanimous opinion among all families.who are divided over what should be done.
But those relatives are not alone. The exchange option has also been defended by the progressive newspaper “Haaretz”, one of the main and most influential newspapers in Israel,
“Israel’s most urgent task is to bring back Israelis held by Hamas and Islamic Jihad in the Gaza Strip. This means only one thing: immediately move forward on a prisoner exchange, including a willingness to release Palestinians imprisoned in Israel”, the newspaper wrote in a forceful editorial on October 11.
The government and Prime Minister Netanyahu “should not try to save Israel’s battered national honor and that of the military at the expense of babies, children, teenagers, the elderly and parents, or at the expense of their families in Israel, who are going crazy with worry and pain,” argued “Haaretz.”
Giora Eiland, a retired general and former president of the Israeli National Security Council, has also been publicly in favor of the exchange, writing in the Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper that “Israel would do well to make two concessions to ensure the release of all the hostages: freeing all 5,000 Palestinian prisoners imprisoned in Israel and temporarily postpone a more aggressive operation in Gaza.”
That operation, however, has already begun and, according to different sources, it would have paralyzed the negotiations for the release of the hostages.
Who opposes the exchange
An agreement to release the hostages was close to being finalized when the ground invasion of Gaza took place, Qatari sources told BBC international affairs editor Jeremy Bowen.
“Israel’s position is that, even though there are 240 hostages, they do not want to give Hamas any type of impunity or reward for what they have done,” explained Bowen, who assured that Israeli spokesmen insist that “force is the only way.” to get Hamas to release the hostages.”
To date, the Israeli government has said that “it will exhaust all possibilities” to bring the hostages home, and Netanyahu said finding them is an “integral part” of the military operation he is carrying out in Gaza.
“The more military pressure, the more firepower and the more we attack Hamas, the greater the chances of pushing them to a place where they accept a solution that allows the return of our loved ones,” said Defense Minister Yoav Gallant.
For those who oppose the exchange, the release of prisoners, including Hamas militiamen and other groups that fight Israel, poses a danger to the security of the country.
The proof, they say, could be seen on October 7 itself: Yahia Sinwar, the current leader of Hamas in Gaza, whom Israel accuses of organizing the attack, was one of the prisoners released in 2011 in another prisoner exchange in exchange for Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit.
“The Shalit agreement exposed a vulnerability in Israel’s security posture, by freeing 1,000 terrorists in exchange for an Israeli soldier. “This experience highlighted what was perceived as a lack of proportionality in these types of exchanges,” one of the members of the Israeli team working on the release of the 240 hostages told The Times.
Accepting a trade, those against it argue, feeds the idea that Capturing hostages is an effective strategy to pressure Israel.
Other exchanges from the past
The most recent and significant case is that of soldier Gilad Shalit, 19, who was kidnapped in 2006 in a raid by Hamas militiamen. The soldier was taken to Gaza, where he was kept hidden and practically incommunicado for five years.
After years of negotiations mediated by Egypt, Shalit was handed over to Israel in exchange for the release of 1,027 Palestinian prisoners.
The awareness campaign carried out by Shalit’s parents, who did not want their son to be forgotten, had great weight in Israeli public opinion.
Shalit’s, however, is not the only case.
In 1983, Israel exchanged six Israeli prisoners held by the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) for 4,700 Palestinians and Lebanese captured in the 1982 Lebanon War, although only 100 of them were considered “security prisoners.”
Two years later, in 1985, in what was known as the Jibril Agreement, the Israeli government released 1,150 prisoners, including Sheikh Ahmed Yasinspiritual guide of Hamas and several convicted of committing massacres in exchange for three Israeli soldiers who had been taken prisoner in the war in Lebanon.
In 2004, in exchange for a civilian prisoner and the bodies of three IDF soldiers, Israel freed 400 Palestinian prisoners and another 30 Lebanese.
Remember that you can receive notifications from BBC Mundo. Download the new version of our app and activate them so you don’t miss our best content.
- Do you already know our YouTube channel? Subscribe