04-Aug-15: Back to prison

Shalit Deal prisoners depart for freedom, October 2011 [Image Source]

When the government of Israel submitted to the extortion of the Hamas terrorist regime, and agreed in October 2011 to release a group of convicted terrorists in order to secure the freedom of a young hostage, Gilad Shalit, a considerable part of what was done received little and often no media coverage. And some of what was said in the media and by political figures was (in our view, and based on looking at things closely) outright wrong. We have a half-written analysis of this that we plan to publish some time soon.

But for now, here's an important news item from today:

A committee charged with reviewing the terms of release for the Palestinian terrorists freed in the 2011 Gilad Schalit prisoner swap deal has decided that 39 of the prisoners released committed additional crimes that warrant their return to jail to complete their sentences. The committee has been examining the cases of prisoners released in the deal since last summer's Operation Brother's Keeper, when some 50 such prisoners were rearrested in the efforts to locate the perpetrators of the June 12 triple kidnapping and murder of three Jewish teens in Judea. The defense establishment filed 48 cases with the committee following the arrests. One of the remaining two prisoners was released and the other was sentenced to return to jail by a military court in Lod. In six of the cases reviewed, released prisoners were not found to have committed an additional crime, but were ordered to return to jail to serve part of their remaining sentences. Appeals have been filed for some of the decisions.
["39 Palestinians released in Schalit exchange to be re-jailed", Israel Hayom, August 4, 2015]

We wish we knew what guidelines were given to this committee. But we don't. We don't know yet which terrorists are going to be serving the balance of their terms or what those prison terms are.

So far, there has been very little media analysis of this. The immediate problem with that is that the Palestinian Arab prisoner propaganda machine is likely to keep doing what it has done for years - entirely distort the facts to create sympathy for some of the most sociopathic individuals imaginable.