Explained | What’s behind the uneven exchange of Israeli hostages for Palestinian prisoners

The exchange of civilian hostages for prisoners, including some whom Israel has accused of terrorism, has raised the ire of some Israelis.

As the Gaza Strip ceasefire took hold, one aspect of the agreement was strikingly lopsided: Hamas released three Israeli women held in Gaza on Sunday, while Israel was expected to release 90 Palestinian women and minors held in its prisons later in the day.

Further exchanges will probably follow a similar formula, with tens of Palestinians freed from prisons in Israel for each hostage held in the Gaza Strip by militants. Over the six-week first phase of the truce, Hamas is expected to release 33 captives and Israel is slated to free about 1,900 Palestinians.

Such an uneven swap is not unusual. Israeli governments have long been determined to bring back captured civilians and soldiers, including dead ones, even at steep costs. The terms of such trades have often prompted fierce criticism domestically, much as a hostage release deal in November 2023 — part of an earlier ceasefire — did within Israel’s governing coalition.

The exchange of civilian hostages for prisoners, including some whom Israel has accused of terrorism, has also raised the ire of some Israelis. In a statement celebrating the release of the three Israeli hostages Sunday, an Israeli military spokesperson, Lt. Col. Nadav Shoshani, hinted at some of that underlying frustration, saying the latest trade was not “a true like-for-like exchange.”

Two of the women were abducted from their homes and one from a music festival, and “then brutally held since,” he said. “This is a huge difference when compared to the terrorists who are being released.”

Hamas officials have said one of the objectives of the group’s Oct. 7, 2023, attack in Israel was to win the release of some of the thousands of Palestinians jailed in Israel, many of them accused of violence against Israeli soldiers and civilians. Many Palestinians say such violence is legitimate resistance to Israel’s decades-long occupation of the West Bank and repeated military campaigns in Gaza. And many are also critical of Israel’s justice system, which they say falsely imprisons some Palestinians, including women and children.

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Yahya Sinwar, the former political chief of Hamas, who was an architect of the October 2023 attack that ignited the war, was intimately familiar with the formulas that Israel has accepted in previous exchanges. He had spent years in an Israeli prison but was released in October 2011 along with more than 1,000 others as part of an exchange for Gilad Shalit, an Israeli soldier captured by Hamas in a cross-border raid in 2006.

Upon his release in 2011, Sinwar pledged “to work hard to free all prisoners, especially those who serve high sentences, whatever the price.” At the time, the lopsided trade raised questions of whether the exchange would encourage more abductions of Israelis.

Israeli troops killed Sinwar three months ago in fighting in Gaza.

There were also earlier precedents for uneven trades. In 2003, the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah exchanged a kidnapped former Israeli colonel and the bodies of three Israeli soldiers killed during a cross-border raid for more than 400 prisoners held in Israel and nearly 60 bodies.

Almost two decades earlier, in 1985, the Israeli government traded more than 1,100 prisoners — including some convicted of perpetrating or masterminding attacks on Israelis — for three Israeli soldiers captured during the Israeli invasion of Lebanon. Some of the released prisoners eventually became senior militant leaders.

During the last ceasefire agreement between Israel and Hamas, a one-week truce in November 2023, Israel released roughly three prisoners — women and minors — for each hostage returned to Israel. Ultimately, Hamas freed about 100 hostages — including more than 20 who were not Israeli and were not included in the deal with Israel — in exchange for about 240 prisoners held by Israel.

The ratio frustrated some critics in Israel, including some relatives of hostages, while other captives’ family members have demanded that Israel pay any price to bring people back. When Israeli soldiers accidentally killed three hostages in Gaza who had escaped their captors, Itzik Horn, whose adult sons were abducted from Kibbutz Nir Oz, said Israel must immediately reach a deal to free all the captives, even if it means releasing Palestinians held in Israeli jails on terrorism charges.

“Let them free all the Palestinian prisoners we have here, all the terrorists — what do I care?” Horn said more than a year ago. “The most important thing isn’t to defeat Hamas. The only victory here is to bring back all the hostages.” Horn’s sons are still being held captive.

The families of hostages are split over this and other issues; a small minority have opposed a deal. The Tikva Forum, an Israeli group representing some captives’ families, opposed the latest ceasefire agreement. In a statement Wednesday, when news of the deal emerged, the group said in a statement on social media that it objected to an agreement with Hamas, which it called “a terror organization that should be destroyed.”

“This deal leaves dozens of hostages behind in Gaza,” the group said. “It also sets the stage for the next massacre and future kidnappings of Israelis.”