I don't think one side would have randomly agreed to release without an exchange. Are you suggesting it would be better to leave the hostages of both sides in captivity just in case something happens upon release?
It sounds to nme that Israel had freedom to choose who would be released or would stay in prison. That there was a number of people negotiated without specifying individuals, and that the number was about 20% of the total prisoners.
Seems like this time, his ratio was even worse.
Even if building a statistic, including this one case, „let’s not relieve any palestinian prisoners, ever“ is not an option. What about „there could be a future terrorist in the midst of the prisoners, hence let’s let the remaining israeli prisoners die, because keeping that one terrorist will save more than 20 lives“? Do you see how problematic sacrificing people’s lives based on a some hypothetical is? And I am not even mentioning the freedom of all other non-terroristic palestinians…
But I guess, after so much death, so much pain, I don’t expect hate to become less any time soon. Maybe one day. Germany and France killed millions of eachother’s civilians yet managed to make peace one day – the big difference is, both had clear borders and autonomy.
But until then, I'd like to remember you of something most people asking for statistical evidence often forget: it's nice to be right if you have statistics available. If you don't have any (viable) statistics, it's much more important to not be wrong than to be entirely right: you don't need to have any data to know that jumping out of an airplane at an altitude of 2km without a parachute is a very bad idea. You also wouldn't ask for a double blind peer reviewed study that confirms a 100% death rate of people doing that. And you wouldn't dismiss the one story about the one guy having done the jump as "anecdotal".
I know it’s easy to be a critic, but I think it’s important to remember what is statistically relevant and what is not. Might sound very harsh and cold considering the topic we are discussing, I understand this.
The analogy of jumping out of a plane is really a false equivalence: there is logical, physical, reasoning, as to why that would be a bad idea. Statistics is not the only option. Extrapolating a decision affecting hundreds of thousands of people from a single occurrence is, in my opinion, never a solution.
If we see another terror attack in several years one may have to question the reason of this line of thinking.
The discourse of this conflict has had a lot of people saying the genocide of Palestinians is bad (true!) but then doing this awkward hand wavey dance of trying to avoid having to confront that Hamas is a violent terrorist cell planted by a foreign government (Iran) rather than a freedom fighting force that cares about the general populace.
But I believe that protecting innocents is morally superior to punishing the guilty. Innocent Israelis and Gazans are being freed, along with (probably) some despicable people.
But acting morally may yield strategically and utilitarianily harmful outcomes against bad faith adversaries.
Personally I think this was a geopolitical blunder of Israel and western interests. The net outcome is favorable. But it could have been much more favorable. I suspect we’ll see a gradual reconstitution of Iranian based power.