The Trump deal is very problematic in every respect. It did an excellent job of securing the return of the living hostages, but it does not deal with the issue of the deceased hostages, and I will explain why.
At the time I proposed that the written condition that would sit above every agreement should be that the first terrorist is released only after the last fallen soldier has been buried. Had we done that, we would not be facing this dilemma today.
Under the agreement the government signed, Hamas is supposed to return everyone within 72 hours. There were real sanctions regarding the living hostages and that is why they were brought back, but regarding the deceased there was left a gap the size of Shalom Tower and it was obvious that Hamas would pass through it and squeeze the life out of us, keep assets we cannot obtain and we will now have to invent levers for that, moreover and this is the main point, Israel currently has no leverage at all over the return of the fallen.
We, the Goldin family, have been on this for 11 years, and the levers presented to us are ineffective because they are the same levers presented to us since the end of 2014. If those levers did not work for 11 years, someone has to convince me they will work now.
The only thing clear in this agreement is that the party running the business now is the US, and for me personally it is very, very difficult that Americans are handling the issue of the deceased hostages in this agreement. I do not see how the State of Israel, which must rebuild Israeli society, contributes to that, and that is my problem today.
I warned, and the disaster happened
For 11 years I have been fighting to bring my son, and I warned that if they did not bring Hadar and Oron Shaul in a proper manner in dealing with Hamas a disaster would happen, and the disaster happened. We fought for two years, we paid with 913 casualties from our best sons, and if they had listened to us, to the Goldin family, everything would have looked different.
Now it is clear we will continue to fight, and it is clear we will not stop until we bring Hadar and all the other deceased hostages, because if we leave them with the enemy, we have lost this war. No matter how many celebrations they hold or what they do, we lost this war because Hamas won, and in this agreement we enabled it that opening.
Now the role of the government of Israel is to show Israelis how it will close that gap, how it will bring the fallen and how we begin a new path. That is its mission, and in the past 24 hours I do not see that happening, only the opposite.
Professor Simcha Goldin is the father of Lieutenant Hadar Goldin, a fallen IDF soldier held by the terrorist organization Hamas since August 2014.
