Unlike the innocent Israeli hostages held by Hamas, Palestinian prisoners released this week were convicted of attempted murder, and received education, medical treatment, and visits from the Red Cross while incarcerated for their crimes.
That’s the contrast drawn by Advocate Ilan Borreda, a retired Brigadier General in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) and the former head of the intelligence division in the Israeli prison service, who oversaw both criminal and terrorist prisons in Israel.
Borreda spoke to the media in Tel Aviv and via Zoom on Monday, the last official day of a pause in fighting between the IDF and Hamas, in which 50 Israeli hostages are meant to be exchanged for 150 Palestinian terror convicts — a lower ratio than in the past. Hamas is already asking to extend the pause by several more days, during which it would provide an additional ten hostages per day, in exchange for more Palestinian prisoners, up to a total of 300 prisoners overall and ten days of a pause in fighting.
The Times of Israel described some of the crimes of the terrorists who had been released over the past several days:
The released inmates included would-be-suicide bomber Israa Jaabis, 38, who was convicted of detonating a gas cylinder in her car at a West Bank checkpoint in 2015, wounding a police officer, and sentenced to 11 years in prison.
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Among those released was also Nurhan Awad, who was 17 in 2016 when she was sentenced to 13.5 years in jail for attempting to stab passersby, including an Israeli soldier, with a pair of scissors in 2015 alongside her cousin, who was shot dead during the attack.
The media has frequently downplayed these crimes, either suggesting that the convicts were innocent (in the case of Jaabis), or in describing the release as a “prisoner exchange,” in the words of Al Jazeera, as if four-year-old children were like adult terror convicts.
Since the NYT version isn’t clear, the reason she is disfigured is that she blew up her car bomb early because she was confronted by an Israeli police officer (Moshe Chen, who was injured in the explosion and still has not fully recovered) before she could reach her target. pic.twitter.com/MsK3dqc3ry
— AG (@AGHamilton29) November 26, 2023
In describing the motives of the released terrorists, all of whom are female and juvenile convict, Borreda said they committed their crimes out of ideological motives, or else to earn the stipend provided by the Palestinian Authority to terrorist prisoners.
He added that all of the prisoners, whether loyal to Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, or the “moderate” Fatah, would now owe loyalty to Hamas, because it had secured their release. That did not meant they would return to terrorism, but some likely would.
As Breitbart News has noted, Israeli hostages were kept in difficult conditions, often unable to eat or to use the toilet, forced to sleep on plastic benches, and unaware whether relatives had been murdered or were also being held as hostages by terrorists.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the new biography, Rhoda: ‘Comrade Kadalie, You Are Out of Order’. He is also the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
