It was a warm morning in Tel Aviv on 19 September 2002 when my younger brother Yoni, just 19 years old, boarded a bus at the city’s central station.
As the crowded bus travelled along Allenby Street, a suicide bomber stepped aboard. Hidden in his rucksack was a payload of nails, bolts and screws. As the bus passed Tel Aviv’s Great Synagogue, he detonated his explosives, murdering six and injuring 70.
A bolt from his bag struck Yoni at the base of his skull, killing him immediately.
A man named Ashraf Zughayer, a resident of East Jerusalem, drove that suicide bomber to Tel Aviv in order to perpetrate this heinous crime. Zughayer was caught and sentenced to six life terms in prison. A measure of justice, however imperfect, was served – or so my family believed.
On 20 January 2025, we received the news that Zughayer was to be released as part of the ceasefire deal in exchange for freeing some of the Israeli hostages abducted by Hamas on 7 October 2023. In total, Hamas would agree to release just 33 of the remaining 92 hostages still held in Gaza, 25 alive and eight dead. In return, Israel would have to release 737 Palestinians arrested for terrorism: the majority (83 per cent) with convictions (many of these serving life sentences); the rest, pending trial or further investigation. In addition, Israel would also release 1,167 Gazans detained since 7 October, who have not been charged and against whom no charges will be brought.
The notion of releasing convicted terrorists, like Zughayer, many serving life sentences for murder, in return for innocent people dragged from their homes or from the Nova music festival into an unimaginable hell in Gaza, is not something that any government should have to countenance.
The moment of Zughayer’s release was agonising. This was not justice. And even beyond my family’s personal pain, we stood in the shadow of a much larger truth: setting convicted murderers free is essentially rewarding Hamas for successfully perpetrating the atrocities of 7 October. It will never bring peace. On the contrary, it is all but certain to invite yet more terror and bloodshed.
We have seen this before. Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, now known as the architect of the 7 October massacre, was a convicted terrorist freed in an earlier hostage deal. By releasing men like him, we do not close chapters – we draft sequels. And by exchanging hostages for terrorists, we send a message that innocent lives are mere bargaining chips waiting to be kidnapped.
What to do? This is the impossible choice placed before Israel today. But in truth there is no choice.
A few weeks ago, as I laid my father to rest in Jerusalem, beside Yoni – who had predeceased him by 22 years – I was grateful that during his final days he was unaware of this grotesque deal. He was spared the knowledge that his son’s murderer had been set free. At the same moment my father was being buried, a 20-year-old woman named Agam Berger was released from captivity in Gaza after a horrific ordeal lasting 16 months. More hostages would follow that day. The relief and joy of knowing Agam was alive and reunited with her family cut through my grief and pain.
The biblical injunction to “choose life” has been a guiding principle of Western civilisation, and it is essential that we protect it against those who so brazenly reject it. Sometimes choosing life requires using military force against those whose stated objective is our death, and the eradication of our way of life. Other times it demands a heart-wrenching sacrifice – the kind that will even countenance freeing murderers to bring our loved ones home.
Nothing can bring Yoni back. But 59 hostages – 24 believed to be alive and 35 dead – remain in captivity and we can bring them home.
Yes, the price is excruciating. Yes, it strengthens the hands of terrorists. But perhaps, paradoxically, it also delivers an unmistakable message that Hamas and their supporters need to hear: all human life is immeasurably precious. The task of protecting it is the most urgent and sacred of all.
After Yoni’s murder, our family chose to donate his organs. One of his kidneys saved the life of an eight-year-old Palestinian girl named Yasmin Abu Ramila. We sent a message then, just as we do today, to those who seek to destroy us: the more you desecrate life, the more we will sanctify it.
The cost of eradicating extremism is almost unbearable. Civilians always pay the heaviest price, especially when they are deliberately placed in harm’s way, readily sacrificed on the altar of extremist ideology. But we cannot surrender to terror, nor accept that the purveyors of death and hate will be permitted to hollow out and destroy societies (both their own and ours) in the pursuit of their fanatical vision of the future.
That is why the battle against Hamas and its ideological bedfellows will continue. They pose an existential threat to all of us; something recognised by the ever-growing coalition of those, including across the Muslim world, who oppose them.
While Hamas might see our obsession with the hostages and our willingness to pay such a heavy price for their return, both dead and alive, as a weakness, it is in fact a tremendous strength. And despite my family’s personal grief, that strength makes me proud. We must do what it takes to bring all the hostages home – it is core to who we are and reflects our deepest values.
And so, we will choose life every time. There is no other way.
[See also: Our overdiagnosis epidemic]
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