When nearly 6,000 terrorists from Hamas and other Gaza-based groups invaded southern Israel on October 7, 2023, they came not only to kill but to capture.

By nightfall, they had dragged 251 people back to the Gaza Strip: soldiers from their bases, mothers, toddlers and pensioners from their saferooms, even Thai farmhands.

“This large-scale kidnapping was a deliberate strategy,” said Boaz Ganor, executive director of the International Institute for Counter-Terrorism at Reichman University.

It was, in a sense, a proven strategy. Hostage-taking had for decades forced Israel to make major concessions, primarily the release of hardened terrorists.

Yahya Sinwar, the architect of October 7, learned this firsthand when, in 2011, he walked free from prison as one of 1,027 terrorists traded by Israel for captured soldier Gilad Shalit. In 1985, Sinwar’s mentor and Hamas’s founder, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, found his freedom the same way: Israel traded him and 1,150 other security prisoners for three captured IDF soldiers.

Jerusalem’s commitment to returning its captives from enemy hands — espoused by prime ministers, IDF veterans, hostage families and religious scholars — is a constant throughout the Jewish state’s history. But how Israel frees its hostages has evolved during the country’s 77 years, from straightforward POW exchanges to dramatic rescues to, more recently, lopsided swaps that set hundreds of terrorists free.

Now, for nearly two years, Israel has found itself in its largest and most complex hostage crisis yet. To secure the release of the vast majority of the hostages taken on October 7, Israel agreed to multiple deals that paused its campaign against Hamas and freed thousands of prisoners, including those with blood on their hands. Many believe Israel will have to do so again to get the remaining captives home.

Hamas’s leaders predicted, correctly, that Israel would pay the price, multiple analysts say. The Israeli public also seemed to take as a given that dozens of prisoners would be released for every hostage. In the two-month ceasefire that began in January, Israel released almost 2,000 terrorists and other prisoners in exchange for 30 living hostages and the bodies of eight more.

However, Israel didn’t always act this way. How did the Jewish state become accustomed to releasing masses of terrorists in exchange for a small number of hostages — even when doing so could place the lives of its citizens in peril?

Israel’s lopsided trades began in the 1950s on the battlefield, when thousands of Arab prisoners of war were swapped for small groups of Israeli soldiers. After the 1956 Sinai Campaign, Israel traded 5,500 Egyptians for four Israelis. Following the 1967 Six Day War, nearly 7,000 Arab POWs were released for 15 captured Israelis, and after the 1973 Yom Kippur War, some 8,000 Arabs were released for nearly 300 Israelis.

Though lopsided due to the stunning success of IDF ground operations, the swaps were relatively straightforward state-to-state arrangements governed by the conventions of international warfare.

“While Israel held the upper hand in terms of the sheer number of enemy soldiers it captured compared to the small number of Israeli prisoners held by the other side, this advantage was not reflected in negotiations,” wrote international relations expert Noa Lazimi in a 2023 Hebrew-language report on Israeli POW policy. In addition to the formal and legal nature of the exchanges, “this was largely due to Israel’s determination to bring conflicts to a close and accelerate the return of its captives — an imperative rooted in a formative value of the Jewish national ethos.”

‘Israel’s approach to hostages stands on two pillars: The Jewish value of redeeming captives, and every soldier’s belief that Israel will bring them home’

Colonel (Res.) Doron Hadar, commander of the IDF’s General Staff Negotiation Unit from 2007 until February 2024, acknowledged this value as a core principle in an interview with The Times of Israel: “Israel’s approach to hostages stands on two pillars: The Jewish value of redeeming captives, and every soldier’s belief that Israel will bring them home,” he said.

The early prisoner swaps reflected this ethos and helped cement in the public mind a perceived “equation of sorts,” Hadar said, namely that the return of an Israeli soldier was worth the release of many enemy prisoners.

Israel’s tactics anticipated the lopsided ratio: Former general and future prime minister Ariel Sharon acknowledged in 2000 that during the 1950s — after terror attacks at home and through reprisal raids in Arab countries — Israel built a “prisoner bank,” holding enemy detainees as bargaining chips for future abductions.

In 1954, the policy led some Israeli leaders to consider drastic steps. After a botched IDF mission near the Golan Heights left five Israeli soldiers in Syrian hands, defense minister Pinchas Lavon green-lighted seizing a Syrian military aircraft as a bargaining chip. IDF chief of staff Moshe Dayan went further, ordering the air force to intercept a Damascus-Cairo civilian flight and trade its passengers for the captives. But prime minister Moshe Sharett intervened to veto the plan, ruling that civilians were off-limits.

Back in Syria, one of the captives — 19-year-old Uri Ilan — was falsely told his comrades had been executed. Determined not to give up military secrets under torture, he hanged himself, hiding a Hebrew note in his uniform reading, “Lo Bagadti” (I did not betray). Two years after their abduction, Israel ultimately handed over 41 Syrian prisoners, most taken in prior IDF raids, for the four surviving soldiers and the body of Ilan, whose suicide note made him a national hero.

An early precedent had been set, cemented in the bond between state and soldier: No captive is abandoned, dead or alive, even when the price is steep.

Israel’s determination to bring back all its captives did not go unnoticed by its enemies.

In the late 1960s and 1970s, the country faced a wave of Palestinian terrorism characterized by both mass-casualty attacks and barricaded hostage situations, in which terrorists........

© The Times of Israel