Israeli prisoner exchanges refer to exchanges of prisoners during the Arab–Israeli conflict. Israel has exchanged POWs with its Arab neighbors, and has released about 7,000 Palestinian prisoners to secure freedom for 19 Israelis and to retrieve the bodies of eight others.
List of prisoner exchanges
1940s and 1950s
The first exchanges took place after the 1948 Arab–Israeli War, when Israel exchanged all its Palestinian prisoners and POWs from Arab armies in exchange for all Israeli soldiers and civilians taken captive during the war.
On December 8, 1954, a five-man Israel Defense Forces (IDF) patrol operating on the Syrian border was abducted and tortured by the Syrian Army. One of the soldiers, Uri Ilan, committed suicide while in captivity after being falsely informed by his captors that his fellow soldiers had been killed. The four surviving POWs and Ilan's body were returned on March 29, 1956, in exchange for 40 Syrian soldiers captured during various Israeli military operations.
Following the 1956 Suez Crisis, Israel exchanged 5,500 Egyptian prisoners captured during the campaign and 77 others who were captured during military operations from before the war, in exchange for an Israeli pilot taken prisoner during the war, and three soldiers taken captive in pre-war attacks.
1960s
On February 21, 1962, Syria exchanged the body of an Israeli soldier it was holding for a Syrian soldier in Israeli captivity.
On December 21, 1963, 11 Israeli soldiers and civilians captured by Syria throughout the years since Israel's independence were exchanged for 18 Syrian prisoners in Israel.
During the 1967 Six-Day War, Israel took 4,338 Egyptian soldiers and 899 civilians, 553 Jordanian soldiers and 366 civilians, and 367 Syrian soldiers and 205 civilians captive, while 15 Israeli soldiers and the bodies of two more fell into Arab captivity. All of them were released following the war. Israeli spies imprisoned in Egypt since the 1950s, two Israeli naval commanders captured shortly after the war, and the body of an Israeli soldier who was abducted a year before the war and subsequently died in prison were also released.
On April 2, 1968, 12 Jordanian soldiers taken prisoner during the Battle of Karameh were released in exchange for the body of a missing Israeli soldier. The Jordanians were supposed to have returned two more bodies, but the coffins were found to contain only dirt, and the soldiers are still considered missing.
In July, 1968 an El-Al airliner was hijacked to Algeria. The twelve Israeli crewmen and passengers were exchanged for 16 Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails. The Israeli government later denied that there had been a deal.
On December 7, 1969, two Israeli citizens whose plane was hijacked to Damascus, and two Israeli pilots, Giora Rom and Nissim Ashkenazi who were shot down over the Suez Canal in the War of Attrition, were exchanged for 71 Egyptian and Syrian prisoners held in Israel.
1970s
On January 1, 1970, a night watchman in Metulla, Shmuel Rosenwasser, was abducted by Fatah. More than a year later Rosenwasser was freed in exchange for Mahmoud Hijazi, a Fatah prisoner in Israel. Hijazi was wounded and captured in Fatah's first military attack on Israel, January 1, 1965, and sentenced to 30 years in prison.
On June 9, 1972, an IDF force captured 5 Syrian officers patrolling near the Israel-Lebanon border, and they were exchanged for 3 Israeli pilots in Syrian captivity.
On June 3, 1973, 3 Israeli Air Force pilots in Syrian captivity for three years were exchanged for 46 Syrian prisoners.
During the October 1973 Yom Kippur War, Egypt and Syria took 293 Israeli prisoners, while Israel captured 8,372 Egyptians, 392 Syrians, 13 Iraqis, and 6 Moroccans. All these prisoners were exchanged during November 15–22, 1973. During the exchange, both sides also swapped prisoners from the War of Attrition.
On April 4, 1975, Egypt returned the bodies of 39 IDF soldiers killed during the Yom Kippur War in exchange for 92 terrorists and security prisoners held in Israel.
In June 1975, Israel released 20 prisoners from the Gaza Strip and Sinai Peninsula. In exchange, Egypt gave Israel the bodies of Eliyahu Hakim and Eliyahu Bet-Zuri, two Jewish fighters of the pre-state underground militia Lehi who had been hanged in 1945 for having assassinated British politician Lord Moyne in Cairo in November 1944.