Rescuing hostages from the hands of a terrorist group involves inherently risky operations. In a tunnel under Rafah on Saturday, Hamas terrorists murdered six hostages captured on October 7, including Israeli-American Hersh Goldberg-Polin, as Israel Defense Forces (IDF) closed in for a rescue attempt. But the alternative, negotiating for the release of hostages, can be just as risky and may even create perverse incentives for future hostage-taking.
In response to the cold-blooded murder of an American citizen, nearly a year after his kidnapping by a U.S. State Department-designated Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO), the White House on Sunday released a strongly worded statement, “Make no mistake, Hamas leaders will pay for these crimes.”
This statement could have suggested a departure from the Biden-Harris administration’s policy of pressuring Israel to pay for the return of the hostages, by making concessions as part of a ceasefire deal. In a previous prisoner exchange, Israel released three prisoners arrested for security crimes (enemy combatants) for every one hostage freed by Hamas (mostly innocent civilians kidnapped in terrorist raids on October 7, 2023).
Through repeated rounds of negotiation, Israel has agreed to various ceasefire proposals, while Hamas has not. “In April, [An]tony Blinken, the [U.S.] Secretary of State, had said that Israel made an extraordinary offer, [and] that it was now Hamas’s turn to accept it. And of course, they rejected that,” enumerated Caroline Glick, senior contributing editor of the Jewish News Syndicate, on “Washington Watch.” “The [Biden] administration had put forward a proposal for a cease fire deal that would bring some of the hostages home in May. … Israel agreed to it and … Hamas rejected it.”
“Last month, the United States put together another ‘final bridging proposal’ … and Israel accepted it, and Hamas rejected it,” Glick continued. “Now, Hamas isn’t even participating in the negotiations. They’ve put forward an ‘offer’ that 80% of Israelis reject.”
Yet, on Monday, President Joe Biden persisted in his policy of pressuring Israel, not Hamas, to make further concessions. When, upon his return to the White House after a two-week vacation, Biden was asked whether Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was doing enough to secure the release of hostages, he answered, “No.” Netanyahu responded that “he couldn’t believe that Biden would say that,” described Glick, “which was a nice way of saying it’s not true.”
On Tuesday, the Biden-Harris administration did follow through on its strongly worded statement that it would make Hamas leaders pay when it issued another strongly worded statement. The U.S. Department of Justice filed a criminal complaint in Manhattan federal court against seven Hamas operatives, which was unsealed Tuesday. Included in the complaint is Ismail Haniyeh, who was killed in Tehran last month, and Yahya Sinwar, mastermind of the October 7 attack, who is currently hiding under Rafah, surrounded by hostages as human shields.
“Who is going to help the FBI execute arrest warrants against Hamas in Gaza?” asked former federal prosecutor Andy McCarthy. “Unless their patrons can save them, the living defendants named in the complaint will be killed or captured by the IDF. They are not coming to the United States.”
“It’s telling that the Justice Department chose to proceed by criminal complaint rather than an indictment,” suggested McCarthy. “To get an indictment, the Justice Department has to present the case to a grand jury. … By contrast, a criminal complaint is just a sworn affidavit by a law-enforcement officer … attesting that there is probable cause to charge various offenses.”
The “utterly unserious” complaint led McCarthy to conclude, “this is not so much a charging document as it is a campaign document.”
“It’s a very strange situation that … the United States is supposed to be Israel’s ally [but] is putting an extraordinary amount of pressure on Israel to agree to demands from a terrorist organization that’s holding 101 … hostages,” Glick exclaimed. “The United States is blaming Israel for the lack of a cease fire. … That’s one heck of a message to be sending to the terrorist army.”
Yet the Biden-Harris administration does not seem to understand the signals it is sending to malign actors around the globe. In fact, many of its decisions make more sense if one assumes they do not understand the signals they are sending. For instance, President Biden’s decision to pull U.S. troops out of Afghanistan, for which Vice President Kamala Harris claimed she was the last person in the room, signaled extraordinary weakness, encouraging American adversaries and catalyzing global hotspots from Ukraine to Taiwan to the Iran-Israel shadow war.
Indeed, a failure to understand how policies send signals that influence behaviors undergirds much of the Biden-Harris record, from its open-border disaster, to its inflationary spending spree, to its toleration of anti-Semitic riots, to the proposed price controls on groceries.
However, these incentives are nowhere more perverse and pervasive than in the Biden-Harris administration’s foreign policy’s encouragement of hostage-taking. This did not begin with the war in Israel.
Nearly a year before Hamas’s gruesome October 7 attack, the Biden-Harris administration performed a prisoner swap with Russia. The U.S. freed international arms dealer Viktor Bout, known as the “Merchant of Death,” in exchange for WNBA player Brittney Griner. Russia arrested Griner at the airport for possession of cannabis oil in her luggage on February 17, 2022. Five days later, Russia invaded Ukraine.
Was the timing of Griner’s arrest purely coincidental, or did Russia deliberately seek to arrest a prominent American to use as a bargaining chip? Either way, the Russians had to be beside themselves with glee at such an advantageous deal.
Three months after releasing Griner, Russia arrested another American, Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich, on charges of espionage. After months of negotiations, Gershkovich was freed in a multilateral prisoner exchange, involving seven countries and 24 prisoners. Russia won back four spies, two hackers, an arms smuggler, and an assassin who served only two years of a life sentence for shooting a target in a Berlin park in broad daylight. “The exchange is a stark illustration of Russia’s willingness to detain innocent Westerners, using them as bargaining chips for political leverage,” The Wall Street Journal noted.
In other words, Russia has learned it can nab influential Americans for little to no reason at all and strong-arm the Biden-Harris administration into releasing the most notorious and dangerous actors in its geopolitical shadow conflict.
The U.S. could reap bitter fruit from these ill-advised hostage deals for decades. Not only has the U.S. released spies, hackers, and assassins to a hostile power who could use them against us or our allies again, but the U.S. has also set a precedent of freeing these prisoners, detained and sentenced with great effort, for Westerners that Russia detains at its leisure on false pretenses.
Returning to the Middle East, Israel is already suffering the consequences of past prisoner swaps. In 2011, Israel released 1,027 prisoners in exchange for IDF tank corporal Gilad Shalit, who had been captured by Hamas in a 2006 cross-border raid. The prisoners released by Israel were collectively responsible for killing 569 Israelis, and 280 of them were serving life sentences for attacks against Israel.
Among the prisoners released in that exchange was Yahya Sinwar, architect of the October 7 attack. At that time, he “was not seen as one of the most dangerous terrorists to release.”
Releasing dangerous terrorists, spies, and other malign actors to free hostages is inherently risky. Such a policy carries greater potential for long-term harm than straightforward rescue operations, even if they don’t always succeed. Such a policy also encourages hostile foreign powers — especially those who don’t care about the rule of law — to engage in further hostage-taking, creating a vicious cycle. A prudent administration would recognize the incentives such a policy creates; alas, instead, we have the Biden-Harris administration.
Joshua Arnold is a senior writer at The Washington Stand.
