Edelstein: Prisoners released this week will commit more acts of terror

Knesset Speaker Yuli Edlestein warns Knesset that the terrorists being released killed "the best of our sons."

By LAHAV HARKOV
Yuli Edelstein 370 (photo credit: Marc Israel Sellem/The Jerusalem Post)
Yuli Edelstein 370
(photo credit: Marc Israel Sellem/The Jerusalem Post)
Prisoners released this week will commit more acts of terror, Knesset Speaker Yuli Edelstein warned Monday.
"We stood for the principle of negotiations without preconditions before this process began, but this morning the names of arch-terrorists with blood on their hands were already publicized," Edelstein wrote on Facebook.
The Knesset Speaker said the terrorists being released killed "the best of our sons and citizens" - soldiers, teachers, and even a Holocaust survivor.
"The Palestinians' 'gesture' to us came soon enough, and this morning rockets were shot at the south. That's why we say 'there is nothing new under the sun,'" he added.
According to Edelstein, "unfortunately, past experience showed us that the day on which we will see headlines stating that one of the released prisoners was involved in a terror attack is not far."
"The equation freeing prisoners equals talks or freezing settlement construction equals talks is wrong and the government has to stop this," Knesset Interior Committee chairwoman Miri Regev (Likud Beytenu) said Monday.
Regev spoke in a Knesset Interior Committee meeting on how the prisoners to be released are chosen.
However, an Interior Ministry representative in the meeting said he didn't know how the terrorists were selected or who made the list.
Almagor Terror Victims' Organization chairman Meir Indor complained that only seven of the 16 families of victims of the terrorists being released were notified before the list of prisoners was sent to the press.
"This is an injustice on top of the even bigger injustice of releasing prisoners," Indor said.
Knesset Interior Committee chairman Miri Regev (Likud Beytenu) told the Justice Ministry representative that the process of notifying the families should have begun earlier, not on the night the names were being released to the press.
MK David Tzur (Hatnua) continued his party's line of blaming the Bayit Yehudi for prisoner releases, saying that the government had a choice of gestures it could have made at the beginning of talks - negotiating on the basis of 1949 armistice lines, freezing settlement construction, or freeing terrorists - and that the worst was chosen because of pressure from the right-wing party.
"Bayit Yehudi ministers are responsible for the prisoner release because they prevented any other option, in order to avoid a political backlash," MK Tamar Zandberg (Meretz) said.
Indor asked Tsur if he thought that, even if one of the other options was chosen as an opening gesture, Palestinian prisoners would be released once an agreement was reached, and Tsur said yes.
"So this is just a scheduling matter?" Indor asked incredulously. "Human lives are not a down payment!"
"In any other place in the world, if someone murdered a Jew and the government wanted to release him, we would shout that it's an injustice," MK Shuli Muallem (Bayit Yehudi) added.
Regev said "no normal country in the world frees murderers" at the end of the meeting, and Zandberg accused her and other "second-tier Likud MKs" of letting out their frustrations at the government even though it is led by their party.