Jewish World Update Jan/Feb 2026
What Is the Price of Peace?
October 13, 2025, was a day of great celebration. Twenty Israelis who had spent two years as hostages under Hamas’s barbaric grip returned to Israel and their loved ones. The haggard men shed tears of joy with their families, and a nation rejoiced.
Their homecoming, along with the bodies of four others who died in captivity, represented the first step in U.S. President Donald Trump’s peace plan, designed to bring an end to the Gaza war. But the number of Israelis who came home pales in comparison to what Israel was mandated to send back: 1,968 Palestinian prisoners arrested since Hamas’s October 7, 2023, massacre, 250 of whom were serving life sentences for crimes, many of which included murder. It’s shameful that Israel had to free these criminals at nearly a 100 to 1 ratio to ensure the lives of innocent civilians.
Much of the watching world ignores or downplays this critical aspect of the peace agreement, which follows the precedent for many deals involving Israel. Since the 1956 Suez Crisis, when the young Jewish state traded more than 5,500 Egyptian prisoners for only four Israelis, the burden repeatedly has fallen on Israel to release extravagant numbers of violent enemies in exchange for a vastly smaller number of its own citizens, often noncombatants simply trying to reunite with their families.
If Hamas would commit to peace, Israel would gladly follow suit. Yet, upon returning home, Palestinians often resume their terrorist activities against the Jewish state.
Yahya Sinwar represents a salient example. Condemned to four life sentences for orchestrating the 1988 murder of two Israeli soldiers and four suspected Palestinian collaborators, the Hamas operative spent 22 years in prison. In 2004, Israeli doctors removed a tumor from his brain that an observant Israeli dentist detected, saving Sinwar’s life. When he was exchanged, along with 1,026 other Palestinian prisoners, for one(!) Israeli soldier in 2011, he quickly reintegrated into Hamas and led its operations in Gaza soon after. He repaid Israel’s benevolence by masterminding the very massacre of 1,200 Israelis in October 2023 that initiated the past two years of war in Gaza.
One would reasonably expect Hamas, in the interest of self-preservation, to lay down its weapons when its leaders agreed to the ceasefire in October 2025. Instead, like clockwork, mere hours after releasing the hostages to the Jewish state, Hamas killed dozens of Gazans—including those suspected of collaborating with Israel—in the streets, several via public execution, to the sound of cheering civilians. Days later, a terrorist cell fired RPGs at Israeli soldiers, killing two and wounding three more. Israel blamed Hamas for the attack. Hamas has not curbed its insatiable appetite for murder.
The most consequential long-term aspect of the current peace deal is Hamas’s required demilitarization. The terms are vague and difficult to enact, and their implementation is as likely as Iran striking up a friendship with Israel. Even if Hamas can’t flash its weapons in Israel’s face, it can play to its strength of concealing its inventory and intentions, waiting to strike until the time is right.
“Death to Israel, death to America!” remains the rallying cry of Hamas and Muslim nations in the Middle East. That longtime mantra reveals the values that compose the identity and ideology of Israel’s enemies. Thus, it’s difficult to conceive of Hamas militants collectively burying their bombs and guns and shaking hands with the people who defeated them on the battlefield.
Trump’s peace plan is commendable, its goals admirable, and its beginning encouraging. But the success of the deal hinges on carrying out, bilaterally, the concrete steps that will lead to peace. Otherwise, a renewed threat surely will soon come knocking at Israel’s door.
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