Security was tight on the tarmac at an airfield in Cologne, Germany, on January 29, 2004.
Police marksmen watched the plane from Beirut and the one from Tel Aviv land at a remote stretch of the tarmac.
The jet from Tel Aviv carried 29 Lebanese and foreign terrorists who were serving life sentences in Israeli prisons. The aircraft from the Lebanese capital carried the remains of three slain IDF soldiers — killed years earlier in a Hezbollah attack — and Elhanan Tanenbaum, an Israeli reservist officer who had been lured to Dubai for a drug deal.
Tanenbaum was then kidnapped by Hezbollah to Lebanon to be used as a bargaining chip.
Once German mediators confirmed the identities of the three dead Israeli soldiers and the exchange in Cologne was done, Israel agreed to release 400 convicted Palestinian terrorists from its prisons.
Negotiators had spent almost four years negotiating the terms of the exchange.\
Then Mossad Director, Meir Dagan, argued that releasing convicted terrorists for three bodies and a criminal was setting a bad precedent.
He maintained those being freed would no doubt kill again.
He was right.
The terrorists released that day went on to murder another 200 Israelis.
How much is one life worth? What’s the going rate for a hundred?
Taking hostages — especially those who are from Western countries — has become a lucrative business for criminals, terrorists, and dictators.
Democratically elected governments face enormous domestic pressure to secure the release of their citizens who have been unjustly imprisoned or kidnapped by terrorists.
Israel has been torn inside out over the plight of the 101 hostages that Hamas still holds in the underground dungeons of Gaza.
The Mossad, the CIA, and the Egyptian and Qatari governments have been negotiating with Hamas for over a year, trying to work out a deal that brings the Israeli captives, even those who are no longer alive, back home.
Hamas has demanded outrageous political concessions from the Israeli government, and it has stood fast that Israel must release thousands of Palestinian terrorists, including those convicted of multiple counts of mass murder, as part of any accord.
Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar understands the art of wheeling and dealing in this human bazaar better than most.
Sinwar is serving multiple life sentences in prison for kidnapping and murder.
He was released in a highly controversial 2011 prisoner exchange that saw the release of 1,027 Palestinian terrorists, including many with blood on their hands, for the safe return of one Israeli soldier.
The terrorists who were released in that deal were responsible for the deaths of close to 600 Israelis. Once freed, as Dagan prophetically predicted, they killed again, though this time it was on an unprecedented catastrophic scale.
One of the negotiating terms of that prisoner exchange was that the men — and women —released in that lopsided deal would sign a contract pledging to refrain from returning to a life of terror and would no longer be active participants in the armed struggle against Israel.
Oct. 7, 2023 illustrates the naivete of that agreement and the worthlessness of the paper it was written on. Terrorists don’t change. Neither do arms sellers.
Viktor Bout, a Russian arms dealer with close ties to Vladimir Putin, made millions of dollars selling weapons to the most dangerous terror groups, rogue nations, and criminal syndicates in the world.
He was known as the Merchant of Death, and in 2008, was arrested by Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) agents in Thailand following a global undercover sting — he was working on a deal to sell antiaircraft weapons to left-wing Colombia guerrilla so that they could shoot down American planes.
Extradited and tried in federal court, he was sentenced to 25 years behind bars.
Putin wanted him free, and he took hostages to ensure his release — the Russians seized captives, and American citizens were arrested and imprisoned on trumped-up charges.
In December 2022, President Joe Biden succumbed to the political pressure to make a deal for the release of Women’s National Basketball player Brittney Griner and he signed off on the trade; Paul Wheelan, a U.S. Marine veteran jailed in Russia, was also freed in the deal.
Like Dagan in Israel, intelligence and law enforcement officials did not want Viktor Bout released, fearing he would go back to arming those who killed Americans.
Their warnings were ignored.
After receiving his hero’s welcome in Moscow, Bout again turned to the arms trade.
His new clients are the Houthis, the Iranian-back Shiite militia in Yemen.
The Houthis are responsible for a civil war in Yemen that has left over half a million dead; they have attacked Saudi oil fields and merchant ships and tankers in the Red Sea.
The Houthis, at the behest of Iran, have opened a front against Israel, launching missiles and drones at the Jewish state.
People have been killed.
How many more people will die with the weapons that Bout sells them?
Terrorists and autocratic leaders seize hostages because they view Western democracies —and their leaders — as weak and prisoners of morality and political pressure.
Until the West changes that paradigm and stops acquiescing to the kidnappers who trade lives like currency in this evil human bazaar, more innocent people will be seized and many more will be killed. How much, after all, is a life worth?
And whose life matters more: the hostage who was freed or the victims who will later die at the hands of those freed on their behalf?
Nitsana Darshan-Leitner is an Israeli civil rights attorney and commentator. She is the president of Shurat HaDin, a law center that legally pursues justice for terror victims worldwide. In 2023, she was chosen as one of the 50 most influential Jews by the Jerusalem Post and Israeli Forbes. She is the co-author of the Best-Seller "Harpoon" published by Hachette.