Redeeming captives is a high Israeli priority. Destroying Hamas must be a higher one

AS IF the mass slaughter and medieval atrocities committed by Hamas in Israel on Oct. 7 weren't nightmare enough, the terrorists also seized at least 150 hostages, who are now being held captive in the Gaza Strip. Most of those abducted were Israeli, but there are Americans, Italians, Thais, and Mexicans among the kidnapped as well.

Hamas has a long history of taking hostages and using them as propaganda vehicles or as leverage to force the release of Palestinian prisoners held by Israel. It knows that redeeming captives is a very deeply ingrained value in Jewish culture. An oft-cited Talmudic dictum, "All of Israel are responsible for one another," resonates powerfully in the Jewish state, which helps explain why Israel has so often consented to pay a wildly exorbitant price to recover its kidnapped citizens.

It dare not do so this time.

The dilemma facing Israel at this moment is excruciating. Scores of its people, including babies, women, and the elderly, are in the hands of sadistic enemies who scruple at nothing and who have just carried out an antisemitic pogrom unspeakable in its barbarity. Everyone knows what might be done to the hostages, and the pressure on Israeli leaders to save them by any means necessary will be understandably intense.

Could "any means necessary" include a daring operation to recover the hostages alive? Many recall Israel's stunning rescue of 102 Jewish hostages in 1976 from Entebbe Airport in Uganda, where they had been taken after Palestinian terrorists hijacked an Air France flight to Paris and rounded up the passengers who were Jews. A team of commandos secretly flew more than 2,000 miles, landed at Entebbe in the middle of the night, killed the terrorists, gathered the hostages, and headed back to Israel.

But that was nearly half a century ago, and Israel's response to subsequent hostage-takings has been very different. Since 1979, Jerusalem has released thousands of prisoners in exchange for a handful of captured Israelis (or the remains of Israelis) held by terrorist organizations. There have been no repeats of the Entebbe triumph.

In 1994, Israeli special forces attempted a rescue of Nachshon Wachsman, a soldier abducted by Hamas. But the operation failed and the 19-year-old soldier was killed before the commandos could reach him.

So when Israeli sergeant Gilad Shalit was abducted by Hamas tunnel infiltrators in 2006, there was no heroic operation to extract him. Shalit spent five years in captivity, incommunicado. Israelis were in anguish over his fate, and when Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's government accepted a deal in which more than 1,000 Palestinian security prisoners would be freed in exchange for the soldier, it had overwhelming public support.

But among those prisoners were perpetrators of some of the bloodiest terrorist attacks in Israel's history: monsters like Aziz Salha, who gleefully displayed his blood-soaked hands to a cheering crowd in Ramallah after lynching two Israelis and mutilating their corpses in 2000. Or like Ibrahim Yunis, the architect of a 2003 cafe bombing in Jerusalem that left seven innocents dead, including a US-born doctor and his 20-year-old daughter on the eve of her wedding. Or like Ahlam Tamimi, a Palestinian TV celebrity who gloats over her role in the 2001 bombing of a Sbarro's pizzeria in downtown Jerusalem, in which 15 people were killed, seven of them children.

Many of those released in the Shalit deal soon resumed their terrorist activities. Israelis were ecstatic when Shalit came home, but the deal set the stage for future terrorist attacks in which innocent Israelis would die.

Nor was that the first time Israel had made such a deal. It can be argued that all the horror ever wrought by Hamas, including the butchery and kidnapping of recent days, stems at least in part from Israel's willingness to redeem hostages by freeing terrorists to terrorize again.

In 1983, Israel convicted a Muslim Brotherhood leader named Ahmed Yassin of illegally stockpiling weapons in Gaza and engaging in paramilitary jihadist activity. Yassin was sentenced to 13 years in prison. But after just two years, he went free in the so-called "Jibril deal" — the swap of 1,150 Palestinian security prisoners for three Israeli captives held by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a terrorist group led by Ahmed Jibril. A few months later, Yassin launched Hamas, setting in motion everything that followed.

Before last week, Hamas held two Israeli captives. Now it is holding scores of them. Their plight is terrible and it isn't only their families who are frantic with desperation.

It would take a miracle of biblical proportions to pull off a successful rescue mission akin to Entebbe. Hamas has likely dispersed the hostages among the many tunnels and underground sites it has built in Gaza, so there can be no lightning Israeli commando strike to get them all out at once. Some of the hostages may be killed in the coming days of fighting. Hamas has threatened to begin executing kidnapped civilians one by one if Israel's air strikes demolish homes in Gaza "without warning." But it seems far likelier that the terrorists will keep them alive in order to extort Israel into emptying its jail cells.

"What we have in our hands will release all our prisoners," a senior Hamas official, Saleh al-Arouri, told Al Jazeera on Saturday. "The longer fighting continues, the higher the number of prisoners will become."

There must be no such prisoner exchange. For Israel to hand over thousands of prisoners would provide Hamas with a massive propaganda victory just as Israeli leaders are vowing that the goal in this war is to destroy Hamas. The prospect of rejecting a deal that could bring those abducted babies and grandparents home is a searing one. But Israel knows that, in The Economist's words, "to reward the deadliest attack in Israel's history with a mass prisoner release is to invite someone to try it again."

The events of recent days have broken so many hearts. The kidnapping of the hostages virtually ensures that there is more heartbreak to come. In this awful hour for Israel and its friends, one goal overrides every other — to win the war against Hamas so decisively that it never again sheds innocent blood.

Jeff Jacoby is a columnist for The Boston Globe, from which this is reprinted with permission."