With a hostage deal likely, Israelis are thinking of the case of Gilad Shalit, a soldier captured by Hamas—using a tunnel—in 2006. He was released in 2011 in exchange for 1,027 terrorists held by Israel. Among them was Yahya Sinwar, who is now the governor of Gaza and the mastermind of the October 7 attacks. Many Israelis have reasonably concluded that the deal made the price of Israeli hostages far too high, and helped pave the way for the current crisis.

It is with this in mind that Elliot Jager considers the Israeli security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir’s recent proposal that convicted terrorists be eligible for the death penalty. Jager, while making clear that he is anything but an admirer of Ben-Gvir, observes that if terrorists like Sinwar were executed, Jerusalem wouldn’t be faced with the dilemma of whether to exchange them for hostages:

[A]fter what happened on Black Saturday, October 7, any claim that the death penalty would paint our enemies into a corner is risible. Certainly, the death penalty should not be off the table for a defendant convicted of the premeditated killing of multiple victims. I accept that capital punishment may not be a deterrent, certainly not for political or Islamist-inspired terrorism. That said, to my knowledge, no executed killer has ever killed again, nor has anyone ever been taken hostage to get a dead man out of prison.

Yesterday, the beepers used by hundreds of Hizballah operatives were detonated. Noah Rothman puts this ingenious attack in the context of the overall war between Israel and the Iran-backed terrorist group:

[W]hile the disabling of an untold number of Hizballah operatives is remarkable, it’s also ominous. This week, the Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant told reporters that the hour is nearing when Israeli forces will have to confront Iran’s cat’s-paw in southern Lebanon directly, in order to return the tens of thousands of Israelis who fled their homes along Lebanon’s border under fire and have not yet been able to return. Today’s operation may be a prelude to the next phase of Israel’s defensive war, a dangerous one in which the IDF will face off against an enemy with tens of thousands of fighters and over 150,000 rockets and missiles trained on Israeli cities.

Seth Frantzman, meanwhile, focuses on the specific damage the pager bombings have likely done to Hizballah:

This will put the men in hospital for a period of time. Some of them can go back to serving Hizballah, but they will not have access to one of their hands. These will most likely be their dominant hand, meaning the hand they’d also use to hold the trigger of a rifle or push the button to launch a missile.

Hizballah has already lost around 450 fighters in its eleven-month confrontation with Israel. This is a significant loss for the group. While Hizballah can replace losses, it doesn’t have an endlessly deep [supply of recruits]. This is not only because it has to invest in training and security ahead of recruitment, but also because it draws its recruits from a narrow spectrum of Lebanese society.

The overall challenge for Hizballah is not just replacing wounded and dead fighters. The group will be challenged to . . . roll out some other way to communicate with its men. The use of pagers may seem archaic, but Hizballah apparently chose to use this system because it assumed the network could not be penetrated. . . . It will also now be concerned about the penetration of its operational security. When groups like Hizballah are in chaos, they are more vulnerable to making mistakes.