By Ethan Bronner
JERUSALEM — Israel, which recently traded 1,027 Palestinian prisoners for one soldier held by Hamas, is planning on establishing rules that would prevent it from making such a lopsided exchange in the future, Defense Minister Ehud Barak said on Thursday.
Interviewed on Israel Radio, Mr. Barak was asked about a classified report submitted to him on guidelines for handling negotiations regarding abducted soldiers. The interviewer asked whether the rules were expected to be made stricter so it would “no longer be 1,000 terrorists for one soldier.”
“I believe that will be the conclusion,” Mr. Barak said. “There is no choice. We have to change the rules fundamentally to protect the state’s overall interests.” He said an important part of the report’s conclusions were on “how to approach the negotiations, in what framework, with what rules, and I think it’s clear that the rules will be a lot stricter.”
The exchange was made for the freedom of Gilad Shalit, an Israeli sergeant who was captured by Hamas in a cross-border raid and held for more than five years in a case that wrenched Israelis.
In a deal brokered by Egypt last fall, Israel agreed to a two-part prisoner release. In the first, in October, it freed 477 prisoners, a majority of whom had been convicted of manslaughter, attempted murder or intentionally causing death. The prisoners included the founders of Hamas’s armed wing and militants who kidnapped and killed Israeli soldiers and civilians; a mastermind of the 2001 bombing of a Jerusalem pizzeria that killed 15 people; and a woman who lured a lovesick Israeli teenager to a Palestinian city and had him murdered.
The second phase, last month, involved what the Israelis called light security prisoners. None had been convicted of killing or wounding anyone, and none were members of Hamas or Islamic Jihad.
Israel has made a number of prisoner exchanges in the past, starting in 1985, when it traded 1,050 prisoners for three Israelis captured during the Lebanon war. Mr. Barak referred to that history, saying it was “time to change this slippery slope.”
In a separate statement issued by his office, Mr. Barak said he had appointed the committee to examine the issue in 2008 and asked a former Supreme Court justice, Meir Shamgar, to be its leader. It was agreed, he said, that the conclusions would not be presented before the return of Sergeant Shalit.
The statement added that given the region in which Israel lived, it would find it difficult to secure its vital interests “unless we change the rules, the reality and the results of deals like those we have witnessed in the last 25 years.”
Both in the statement and in the radio interview, Mr. Barak declined to be more specific, saying that the report, which he said was nearly 100 pages long, was classified and that ultimately the new rules would have to be established by the prime minister and the government.
