Releasing hundreds of terrorists in exchange for fewer than three dozen hostages will guarantee more hostage-taking and more terrorism.

In the coming months, I wonder how foolish Presidents Trump and Biden will look for fighting over who should get credit for the cease-fire deal between Israel and Hamas that went into effect this morning.

Since history is already being rewritten to put lipstick on this pig, let’s be clear on what happened.

As is his wont, Trump made intemperate threats, in this instance: If the hostages weren’t released prior to his being sworn in as president at noon on Monday, there would be “hell to pay” for Hamas. Not if a deal — no matter how appalling — wasn’t reached; he said the hostages had to be freed before he took the oath of office. And he didn’t appear to limit this to the American hostages (seven remaining in all, three believed to be alive, four deceased). His remarks were addressed to “the hostages” — estimates of the total vary, but there are probably 97 or 98 remaining October 7 hostages. No one on the Israeli and American side of the negotiations with the terrorists and their state sponsors — oh, sorry, I mean the elected Palestinian regime and our invaluable allies Qatar and Egypt — can say for sure how many of that total are already dead.

Don’t take my word for it. Here’s the president-elect’s own words in a Truth Social post on December 2, 2024:

Everybody is talking about the hostages who are being held so violently, inhumanely, and against the will of the entire World, in the Middle East – But it’s all talk, and no action! Please let this TRUTH serve to represent that if the hostages are not released prior to January 20, 2025, the date that I proudly assume Office as President of the United States, there will be ALL HELL TO PAY in the Middle East, and for those in charge who perpetrated these atrocities against Humanity. Those responsible will be hit harder than anybody has been hit in the long and storied History of the United States of America. RELEASE THE HOSTAGES NOW! [My italics; caps are Trump’s.]

Yet on Wednesday, before there was a deal, Trump raced to social media to claim: “WE HAVE A DEAL FOR THE HOSTAGES IN THE MIDDLE EAST. THEY WILL BE RELEASED SHORTLY. THANK YOU!”

“SHORTLY?” What happened to there being hell to pay if they weren’t released before he took office?

At the time, there was no deal. Even now, all we have is the same framework for the terrible deal that Biden put on the table last spring. It is most certainly not an agreement for the release of all the hostages. It is a tenuous commitment for the release of 33 hostages, to be dribbled out over 42 days, beginning with a grand total of three today. After the first phase (and, indeed, during the first phase), you’ll just have to trust Hamas — a designated terrorist organization under American law for nearly 30 years, the jihadist group whose atrocities 15 months ago began this latest round of sharia-supremacist Islam’s multifront war of annihilation against Israel.

An interesting thing about that: When Trump started bellowing about hitting Hamas harder than anyone has ever been hit, at least you could say he was warning a terrorist organization that has been holding Americans for 15 months. Whether he was serious is another story, but at least he wasn’t negotiating with terrorists. If the Biden administration wanted to negotiate with Hamas (through Qatar and Egypt) — and, by so doing, reward hostage-taking in a manner that assures future hostage-taking — that wasn’t Trump’s doing.

But now it is.

Let’s be real. Trump drew a red line he had no intention of defending, reminiscent of President Obama’s ill-considered red line in Syria. He was talking trash. Hamas and its backers took him seriously, not literally, and thus knew he wasn’t serious. They were never going to release the hostages before Inauguration Day.

As ever, while Trump’s apologists engage in revisionism about what he said, they simultaneously claim that what matters is his master plan. Personally, I don’t think he has one — I think he got out over his skis and then pressured Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu to agree to something he could spin as a win.

Of course, I could be wrong. We’re not privy to Trump’s discussions with Netanyahu. Maybe, as the prime minister says, Trump gave him assurances that he’ll have a well-armed free hand to prepare for and execute a decisive response when Hamas violates the agreement, as everyone knows it will do. We’ll see.

Surely, though, Netanyahu grasps that anything he has been secretly promised is contingent on what things look like to Trump when Israel tries to cash in. The incoming president is, as they say, “transactional.” His admirers regard this as an attribute of the skilled dealmaker. To my mind, it’s a guarantee that he’ll react to events rather than drive them — seeking an outcome that will be popular, with strategic benefits a second-order concern.

Jihadists are more hardheaded than that. They’ve studied Trump’s dealings with the Taliban in his first term. They know that his instinct is to get out of confrontation, not dive in with both feet. Hell was never going to be unleashed. That was about as likely as Trump’s ending the Ukraine war within the first 24 hours of his presidency, . . . or using his “bigger button” against Little Rocket Man (before they fell in love). Bottom line: Trump says a lot of stuff.

Does Hamas figure that Trump is more sympathetic to Israel than were the Biden administration and the Democrats? Sure. But you can bet the terrorists are taking heart from Trump’s sudden infatuation with Muslim voters after his winning Dearborn, Mich.; his invitation to Husham al-Husainy, a pro-Hezbollah antisemitic Dearborn imam, to give a benediction at Monday’s inauguration; and his profession of friendship with Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Turkey’s Islamist strongman — an inveterate antisemite and a stalwart champion of Hamas. Just as Trump has done a 180 on TikTok, which he used to want to ban, because he’s convinced that it helped him in the election, so too is he certain that he’s making inroads with Muslims. During his first term, as I said at the time, the blather about “principled realism” illustrated that he is unschooled and uninterested in fundamentalist Islam and its catalyzing of terrorism. (I’m sure he figures that Erdoğan is fine because he personally gets along with Erdoğan — so what’s the problem?)

What does it all mean? It means Hamas could be confident that Trump was bluffing, that there was no way he’d begin his second term with forcible action in Gaza and upset those newly minted, anti-woke Trump voters in Michigan. He was more apt, like Biden and the Democrats, to lean on Israel to end the fighting. Like the Taliban, Hamas knew that if it hung tough with Trump it could get a favorable deal. And it has. That’s why Palestinians are celebrating in Gaza, where Hamas has its forces back out on the streets, openly patrolling and controlling the Strip.

After spending two years on the campaign trail railing about how “stupid” Biden’s foreign policy is, Trump has delivered Biden’s policy. He now says that only he could have gotten this done, which may be true but is nothing to brag about. Biden didn’t get the deal done when he proposed it about eight months ago because Israel had the good sense to ignore him and forcefully prosecute the war against Hamas (and in multiple other fronts where jihadists backed by Iran and Qatar have attacked).

On that score, it is worth remembering why Israel had Hamas on the brink of destruction as an effective fighting force. Of course, it had killed many Hamas leaders and many jihadists on the ground. But you can’t kill everybody. Consequently, a vital part of quelling Hamas has been capturing and detaining thousands of trained jihadists. Under the Trump/Biden-brokered cease-fire, however, a jaw-droppingly high percentage of those jihadists will be released.

See the problem? This week, Trump’s nominee for defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, and the incoming White House national security adviser Mike Waltz loudly proclaimed the importance of wiping out every last Hamas fighter. Meanwhile, in exchange for 33 hostages held by Hamas, the deal that Trump’s envoy, Steve Witkoff, pressured Netanyahu to take, will return at least 735 terrorists to the jihad — and no doubt more, since more than 2,000 Palestinians will be released.

The jihadists are collectively responsible for killing hundreds of innocent people. They are being returned to a terrorist organization that, besides its ravages against our ally, killed 46 Americans on October 7, abducted a dozen, some of whom they brutally murdered, and has continued for 15 months to detain in horrific conditions three Americans — Edan Alexander, Keith Siegel, and Sagui Dekel-Chen — none of whom is among those released today.

Here, it is vital not to conflate Israeli and American interests, which are generally aligned but have important differences.

Israel is a Jewish state. That doesn’t just mean that Jews live there; it means that, unlike in the United States, Israel has an established religion and a national commitment to live in accordance with Judaism’s tenets. Included among these is the imperative of rescuing captives. The hostages of October 7 are not merely a profoundly emotional, first-order political issue for Israelis. The prioritization of their return, over other national security considerations (other than national survival itself), instantiates the Jewish state’s essence.

That is not our top priority. Obviously, we care deeply about the hostages, particularly the Americans. But they do not carry the same weight for us as they do for the Israelis. We, for example, have a policy not to negotiate with terrorists, even if it means they are likely to kill people they’ve abducted. Our priority is to not encourage terrorists to take hostages.

In 2011, Israel released 1,207 Palestinian prisoners, who were collectively responsible for the killing of hundreds of Israelis, in exchange for a single Israeli soldier, Gilad Shalit, who had been captured by jihadists five years earlier. I understand why the Israelis made the deal, and if I were an Israeli, I might have felt obliged to as well. As an American, though, viewing the matter as a U.S. national security official would have to view it, I couldn’t help but find it grossly irresponsible. Can any of us be surprised that it resulted in the release of hundreds of Hamas jihadists — including Yahya Sinwar — who, 15 months ago, executed the worst atrocity against Jews since the Holocaust?

Given their beliefs and their geopolitical reality, Israelis have to negotiate with terrorists and their state sponsors. Israelis have to accept one-sided prisoner exchanges. Although, at a certain point, there must be a rule of reason regarding how one-sided these can be, as was recognized by Israel’s national security minister, Itamar Ben Gvir, who has resigned from Netanyahu’s coalition over the cease-fire agreement he calls a “surrender-to-terror deal.”

It is not enough to say that we don’t have to negotiate with terrorists and accept one-sided exchanges. We have an obligation not to do so given our broader responsibilities. To protect Americans, our government must adhere to the commonsense conclusion that if we reward hostage-taking, we guarantee more hostage-taking and, inexorably, more terrorism.

The only appropriate way for us to discourage the taking of American hostages is to rain hell down on those who take them. Trump knows that, which explains his huffing and puffing on the campaign trail. But candidates can huff and puff. Those who govern have to make the actual tough call, knowing that forcible action can yield benefits but can also go horribly wrong.

In a scandal for the ages, Biden has not functioned as president for years. It is a void that Trump has relished filling since his election in November. But he couldn’t actually fill it because he lacked the powers of the office, with which he’ll be endowed on Monday. Because he wasn’t in a position to wield power, he didn’t need to say anything about the hostages. If he had chosen to speak, he could have been strategically unpredictable yet measured — “We’ll see what happens” is his usual tack, and it can be an effective one.

Instead, he issued a loud threat that he wasn’t prepared to back up with the commander in chief’s big stick. Hamas knew he was bluffing, and now it is cashing in on its hostage-taking.