A Smarter Law for the Worst Terrorists: No More Hostage Currency

A Smarter Law for the Worst Terrorists: No More Hostage Currency

In the wake of October 7, it is emotionally easy – and politically tempting – to say, “just execute them.” The Knesset’s new death penalty bill for terrorists rides that wave of rage and grief, promising that “terrorists will be released only to hell.” 

I understand the emotion and suggested that the death penalty for terrorists be an obvious lesson learned.  Hamas and Islamic Jihad dragged some 250 people into Gaza as hostages on October 7, 2023, including children and the elderly. Many were abused in ways that our own Health Ministry has now documented: beatings, starvation, sexual assaults, confinement in dark rooms. Hezbollah, for its part, built an entire “prisoner exchange” business model around kidnapping Israeli soldiers to trade for mass releases of convicted killers.

We also know the other half of the story: Israel repeatedly swaps hundreds or even thousands of convicted terrorists – including murderers – to get back a handful of our people, sometimes only bodies. The result is a bitter sense that some prisoners “who should never see the light of day again” eventually walk free, celebrate on camera, and sometimes return to terror.

That problem is real. But the current death penalty bill is the wrong tool for a real problem.

Instead of a broad, populist “death for all terrorists” law that will be used almost exclusively against Palestinians and damage Israel’s standing, we should write a narrow, surgical statute aimed precisely at the Hamas/Hezbollah model of hostage-taking and mass-murder leverage.

The real problem: Hostage-taking as a strategic industry

Hamas and Hezbollah are not just “terror organizations.” They are hostage economies.

• Their business model explicitly includes abducting Israelis – alive or dead – as currency for extracting huge prisoner releases and other concessions.
• The “extraordinary asymmetry” of our past swaps – hundreds or thousands of convicted terrorists for one or two Israelis – only reinforces their incentive to keep doing it.
• If we want to change that calculus, the law should send one clear message:

“If you take hostages or participate in their torture and murder as part of an organization dedicated to destroying Israel, you will never again be free – not by parole, not by political deal, not by a ‘one more time’ gesture.”

Whether the sentence is death or life without the possibility of release is a separate moral debate. The critical point is no more hostage currency at the very top of the terror hierarchy.

A proposed framework: The “Hostage-Taking Extremist Organizations Law”

Here is what a more responsible law could look like.

1. Focus on specific organizations, not generic “terrorism”

The statute would not apply to “any terrorist” in the abstract. It would apply only to members and operatives of designated Hostage-Taking Extremist Organizations, defined by three cumulative criteria:

1. The group is already recognized in Israeli law as a terrorist organization.
2. Its stated ideology or charter – or consistent, documented practice – includes:
   • The destruction of the State of Israel as a sovereign Jewish homeland, or
   • The mass killing or expulsion of Jews from Israel.
3. It has an established pattern of hostage-taking of Israelis (civilian or military) as a tool to force prisoner releases or strategic concessions.

Under these criteria, Hamas and Hezbollah clearly qualify today.  The door remains open, however, for any future group – including a hypothetical Jewish or foreign extremist organization – that meets the same standard.

This immediately pushes us away from “Arabs versus Jews” and toward a much sharper category: organized, genocidally-oriented hostage-takers.

2. A controlled, transparent designation process

Which organizations go on this list cannot be left to a single minister’s press conference.

The law should require a formal designation process:

• Initiation: The government (through the Defense or Justice Ministry) submits a request to designate Group X as a “Hostage-Taking Extremist Organization.”
• Evidence dossier: The request must include publicly reviewable evidence – charter texts, leadership statements, patterns of attack, hostage incidents, UN or foreign terror listings.
• Knesset oversight: A cross-party Knesset committee must approve the designation by a supermajority, with a written decision.
• Judicial review: The designation is subject to petition and review by the High Court of Justice, which can require higher evidence standards or strike down abusive designations.

Designations would be reviewed periodically (say, every five years) to prevent “forever labeling” of groups that genuinely and demonstrably abandon terrorism and genocidal aims.

This structure both narrows and legitimizes the law: if the state wants the extraordinary power to execute, it must earn that power with transparent evidence and democratic oversight.

3. The core offense: Hostage-taking and command responsibility

The law should define a specific offense for which the extraordinary penalty applies. For example:

Any person who, as a member or operative of a Hostage-Taking Extremist Organization, intentionally participates in the abduction, prolonged detention, torture, or killing of a hostage, for the purpose of using that hostage as leverage against the State of Israel, shall be sentenced to death.

Participation includes:

• Direct kidnapping or guarding of hostages
• Planning, commanding, financing, or providing logistical support for the operation
• “Command responsibility” for a chain of hostage-taking operations under one’s authority

This is not about the kid who throws stones; it is about the hostage industrialists.

4. The “never again free” provision

The heart of the law is not the method of punishment, but its finality.

It recognizes that Israel will go to extraordinary measures to redeem living or dead hostages, even to the release of the very worst people in its prisons.

If Israel still chooses to enter asymmetric prisoner deals in the future, the very worst hostage-taking masterminds will simply not be on the table because they will be dead.

In moral terms, this is a promise to the families: this particular man will never again celebrate his freedom while your child lies in a grave.

5. High procedural safeguards

If we are going to create a “death” category, the process must be stricter than ordinary criminal cases.

The law should require:

• A panel of three professional judges, not a single judge plus laypeople
• Unanimous agreement on guilt and on the application of the special sentence
• Automatic appeal to the Supreme Court, with full review of both conviction and sentence

These safeguards are also a message to the world: Israel is not running lynch courts; it is applying extraordinary penalties through the highest legal standards it can impose.

What about the current death penalty bill?

The bill now moving through the Knesset sets a very different standard: a “terrorist who murdered an Israeli citizen out of motives of racism or hostility toward the public, with the intention of harming the State of Israel and the rebirth of the Jewish people in their land” must be sentenced to death, and to no other punishment.

On paper, that sounds powerful. In practice, it has three serious flaws:

1. It is far too broad. Any nationalistically motivated murderer could be swept in, even in situations far removed from the Hamas/Hezbollah hostage model.
2. It is structurally discriminatory. The political rhetoric around the bill makes clear it is intended to apply to Palestinian attackers, not to Jewish extremists who kill Palestinians for nationalistic reasons.
3. It does not actually solve the hostage problem. The bill is not tailored to hostage-taking, to the economy of prisoner swaps, or to the command structures of groups like Hamas and Hezbollah.

It is a blunt instrument thrown into a very precise dilemma.

By contrast, the law I’m suggesting speaks directly to that dilemma: Who must never be swap currency again? The answer is not “every terrorist ever.” The answer is: those who build and run the hostage machine inside organizations dedicated to our destruction.

Life without parole or the death penalty?

Reasonable people can disagree about whether the ultimate sentence should be:

• Mandatory life imprisonment without possibility of release, or
• The death penalty

Personally, I lean towards death as the default because the alternative won’t work. It is severe, final in practice, and overcomes Israel’s “redeem the hostage at any cost orientation.” It also keeps Israel closer to the norms of democratic states that have moved away from the general use of executions.

But even those who firmly support capital punishment should want it narrow, procedurally rigorous, and tightly tied to the most extreme category of offender. That’s precisely what this kind of law would do.

Why this matters now

As Israel continues to grapple with hostage deals – the living and the dead – we are caught in our own version of a prisoner’s dilemma.  Every time we accept an extraordinarily lopsided exchange, we save lives in the short term but strengthen the hostage industry in the long term.

We cannot wish away the emotional blackmail of seeing our people in tunnels and propaganda videos. We probably will continue to do ugly, asymmetrical deals when the alternative is leaving hostages to die.

But we can at least say this:

There is a line of no return for those who make a career out of abducting and torturing Israelis as part of an enterprise that openly seeks to erase our country. Cross that line, and you will never again be a bargaining chip. Not for ten soldiers, not for a thousand prisoners, not for anything.

That is what a serious, narrowed law should do.

Not a populist slogan. Not a headline about the death penalty.
A transparent, principled, legally robust firewall between our unavoidable compromises and the men who built the hostage industry in the first place.