By Amit Segal
Sunday, October 12, 2025
It’s Sunday, October 12, and Hamas is set to start
releasing hostages tomorrow at 6am Israel time—a process that will continue
until midday. As for Palestinian murderers in Israeli prisons, per the deal,
they’ll only be released once the last Israeli hostage is home.
But there’s one problem: Hamas seems unable to find the
bodies of eight or nine dead hostages. And so, what may well happen is that the
39 or 40 hostages whose location is known will be freed, after which Israel
will release Palestinian terrorists from its jails.
And there may be another twist: this morning, the Wall
Street Journal reported that Hamas told Israel it already has the 20 living
Israeli hostages and is ready to begin releasing them today. Jerusalem,
however, remains skeptical.
Either way, as desperate as Israelis are for the hostages
to come home, many in the Jewish state are distressed, to say the least, by the
Palestinian terrorists being released in the deal. Given that it doesn’t
receive as much attention as it deserves in Western media, I’ll take this
moment to briefly explore some of the nearly 2,000 Palestinians being released
from Israeli jails.
Hilmi Abdul Karim Muhammad Hammash, who
coordinated a 2004 suicide bombing on a bus in Jerusalem, killing 11 Israelis
and wounding 50.
Morad Bader Abdullah Adais. In 2016, he stabbed to
death Dafna Meir, a 38-year-old mother to six, in front of her teenage
daughter, at the entrance to their home in Otniel.
Jihad A-Karim Azziz Rom. 25 years ago today, IDF
reservists Vadim Norzhich and Yosef Avrahami accidentally drove into Ramallah,
and were detained by Palestinian Authority police. Once word got out that two
Israeli soldiers were at the police station, a crowd gathered outside the
station, before eventually breaking in, where they beat and stabbed Norzhich
and Avrahami to death.
Azziz Rom participated in the lynching, as well as the
kidnapping and murder of 18-year-old Yuri Gushchin in 2001.
Few, if any, Palestinian terror attacks are seared into
the Israeli psyche as deeply as the Ramallah lynching, thanks to a TV crew
capturing the moment Aziz Salha ran out to proudly show his blood-soaked hands
to the Palestinian crowd outside the police station. (An IDF airstrike in Gaza
late last year killed Salha.)
 |
Aziz Salha shows his bloody hands to the cheering crowd during the Ramallah lynching, October 12, 2000. |
That may be shocking enough, but for an even deeper understanding of how gruesome the murder was—and why it’s forever stained into Israelis’ memories—it’s worth reading The Telegraph’s report following the incident.
“Two soldiers, held on the first floor, were beaten and
stabbed to death.
Television showed one of the attackers run to the second
floor window and make a victory sign and then return to the fray. In the
background, several men were seen pounding on something or someone on the
floor. The crowd erupted into cheers. The attackers tossed one of the men out
of the window, another out the door. One of the soldiers was seen dangling
upside down, apparently attached to a rope. The crowd stood below, waving fists
and cheering.
The body was dropped into the compound, where the mob
stamped on the corpse and beat it with the broken bars of a window grille… At
10.30 the mob dragged the two bodies to Al-Manara Square, the town centre,
where an impromptu victory celebration began.”
And those are just three of the prisoners Israel is
releasing in order to bring the hostages home.
Tomorrow, God willing, Israeli parents, spouses and
children will embrace their loved ones once again after 738 days of hell. And
somewhere else, the men who tore other families apart will walk out of prison
to applause.
That contrast says it all.
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