As part of the phase one deal brokered by President Trump between Israel and Hamas, Israel is to receive 20 living hostages taken by Hamas and 28 corpses of hostages killed by Hamas. Hamas gets 2,000 prisoners released from Israeli detention, 250 of whom are terrorists sentenced to life in prison for murdering Israelis. The New York Post has a good story on the terrorist murderers here. In his It’s Noon In Israel newsletter this morning, Amit Segal provides details on three of them:
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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.)
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.
