Now that Israel has received back deceased hostage Hadar Goldin from Hamas, it is appropriate to delve into who he was and why it took 11 years to retrieve him.
On August 1, 2014, Hamas captured Givati Brigade Lt. Hadar Goldin while he was involved in an operation to decommission a tunnel near Rafah.
They attacked him and other soldiers during a temporary ceasefire, leading to the Black Friday battle in Rafah, an incident in which a number of Israeli soldiers, Hamas terrorists, and a significant number of Palestinian civilians were killed.
When then-Givati Brigade commander Ofer Winter realized that Goldin was potentially being taken – Israel did not yet know that he was dead – he ordered the Hannibal Directive, which includes opening fire in a much more extensive way than usual.
Part of the idea was to take greater risks to try to prevent Hamas from successfully kidnapping a live soldier – even if part of the risk could mean endangering that soldier – to avoid giving the Gazan terror group new leverage to force Israel to return Palestinian terrorists in Israeli jails.
There was extensive media coverage, negotiations, and government activity around Goldin’s situation and regarding the possibility of returning him for several months.
Had his kidnapping taken place three to five years earlier, Goldin would likely have been returned sooner, with Israel offering hundreds or even a thousand Palestinian security prisoners in return.
This was the pattern that Israel followed a few times in the 2000s, through the 2011 Gilad Schalit deal.
However, that deal changed everything.
Many of the more than thousand Palestinian security prisoners whom Israel released in exchange for Schalit after he was kidnapped by the Gazan terror group were documented to have murdered Israelis after their release.
One killed a senior police commander, Baruch Mizrahi.
All of these killings flipped the wider Israeli public and the political echelon from being strongly in favor of deals exchanging huge numbers of Palestinian prisoners for one or a small number of Israeli hostages to being strongly against.
When Lior Lotan, who had handled many of the negotiations with Hamas, resigned in 2017, he said that the government had not done all it could have to return Goldin.
Responding to Lotan’s criticism, then-defense minister Avigdor Liberman thanked the hostage negotiator but, in many ways, confirmed the criticism, saying Israel should not be willing to pay too high a price for returning hostages kidnapped by Hamas.
Liberman was calculating future cost in human lives
It was not that Liberman did not care about the hostages. However, he simply thought that the future cost in human life by releasing Palestinian security prisoners could not exceed the benefit of saving one life, or in this case, returning Goldin.
“I would like to thank Lior Lotan for his devoted work. I accept the criticism from the Goldin and Shaul families with understanding and love and remain personally committed to bringing Hadar and Oron back to Israel, as well as our citizens who are being held captive in the Gaza Strip,” Liberman said.
Oron Shaul was killed and kidnapped by Hamas in 2014, and he was recovered by the IDF and Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency) in January this year.
Still, Liberman said, Israel “must not repeat the mistake” of the 2011 prisoner exchange deal to free Schalit.
“In that deal, we freed 1,027 terrorists, including murderers and their handlers, the person who funded the kidnapping of the three teens in 2014, and Yahya Sinwar, who is currently the leader of Hamas in Gaza and who is making inflexible demands that are not letting us progress toward any deal,” he said.
Liberman was opposed to an exchange of prisoners for hostages, listing Sinwar as part of the proof that releasing Palestinian prisoners could lead to vast negative future effects, and in 2017, neither Liberman nor anyone else realized how badly Sinwar would harm Israel on October 7, 2023.
He added, “It’s important to remember that 202 of the prisoners freed in the Schalit deal have since been re-arrested by the defense establishment for involvement in terrorism, and 111 are still in prison in Israel. Seven Israelis have been murdered with the direct or indirect involvement of prisoners freed in exchange for Schalit,” Liberman said.
Reportedly, Liberman told some close associates that “on my watch, there won’t be another Schalit deal.”
While this is a summary of Liberman’s statements, his hardened view against another prisoner exchange deal also represented an evolution by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on the issue.
Bennett, Lapid, did not change policy during time as PM
During the tenures of Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid, who served as prime ministers from June 2021 to December 2022, there was no real change in that policy.
Certainly, until October 7, 2023, and even afterward for much of the war, Netanyahu and top coalition officials like Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir opposed more exchange deals of Palestinian prisoners for Israeli hostages.
But for much of the country, the October 7 invasion flipped public opinion back to the earlier view: It is necessary to make great sacrifices, including giving back thousands of prisoners to get back hostages.
Over 250 hostages, a majority of whom were alive and were civilians, broke through the opposition to send back Palestinian prisoners to Hamas.
Comments about a rational cost-benefit calculus that the state would lose in the future vs what it would gain now became less frequent, and comments about the moral duty to bring back Israeli hostages at all costs became more frequent.
Despite the majority of the country wanting to make the trade to get Goldin back, there were no hostage deals of any kind from November 2023 until January 2025, and the full return of Israeli hostages was not agreed upon until October of this year.
After the final deal last month, speculation heated up about whether Goldin would be returned in the near future or whether he was one of those that Hamas had said it had lost.
Hamas clearly wanted to try to get some new concessions in exchange for Goldin, which they had held onto for 11 years.
But then 200 of Hamas’s forces became trapped in Gaza, and for them to survive and make it back into the part of Gaza controlled by Hamas, Israel made it clear that getting back Goldin was one of multiple preconditions.
On Sunday, Israel learned that this 11-year saga had finally come to a close.