Yahya Sinwar, Hamas’ leader in Gaza, is today among the most famous antagonists of Israel and the Jewish people. Yet in 2011, when the Oct. 7 mastermind was released from Israeli prison as one of 1,027 Palestinian prisoners exchanged for Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit, he was not seen as one of the most dangerous terrorists to release, Emi Palmor, a member of the Israeli negotiating team, told Jewish Insider this week.

While the Shin Bet “stood on its hind legs” to strongly oppose the release of terrorists who murdered Israelis, Sinwar was not one of them, Palmor recounted. 

“A lot of people don’t know this, but Sinwar’s nickname is ‘the butcher of Khan Younis’ because he was known for his cruelty to the Palestinians,” she said. “He was in Israeli prison for murdering Palestinians, not Jews. He murdered four Palestinians accused of collaborating with Israel. He killed them himself – he strangled one, he hanged another by his feet… He is a sadist; there is no question.”

According to the law in Israel, victims of a violent or sexual crime have the right to submit their opinion on any request for clemency or a pardon for the perpetrator to the Justice Ministry’s Pardons Department, which Palmor led at the time.

Because Sinwar was not in prison for killing Israelis, “there were no families who said at the time, in 2011, ‘don’t free the man who murdered our father,’ which is the classic Israeli response,” she said.

Palmor, who later became director-general of Israel’s Justice Ministry and is now a member of Meta’s Oversight Board, was the only member of the Shalit negotiations team who was part of the process for all five years.

As a result, Palmor said, “I know Sinwar’s whole file.” 

“I wouldn’t say it was easy to release him. We knew, the Shin Bet knew, that he was bad,” she said, but there would not have been an agreement to free Shalit if Sinwar was not part of it.

“Shalit was kidnapped by Sinwar’s brothers in order to free Sinwar,” she said. “The Palestinians gave all kinds of lists [of prisoners], and he was on all of them.”

Palmor pushed back against the argument that Hamas would not have taken hostages in the Oct. 7 attack if not for the Shalit deal.

“We now know that the government could have killed Sinwar and didn’t do it,” she argued. 

As for what Israel can learn from the Shalit deal in the ongoing negotiations to release hostages from Gaza, Palmor said that more of the terrorists should be deported. She noted that in the past, deported Palestinian terrorists were accepted by Jordan, Turkey and Ireland, among other countries.

While Sinwar was in Israeli prisons, “he was very dominant. He interrogated and tortured other prisoners,” Palmor said. 

While a prisoner, Sinwar underwent surgery in Israel’s Sheba Hospital to remove a brain tumor, receiving “medical care that the average citizen in most countries in the world could only dream of,” Palmor said.

The future leader of Hamas in Gaza studied Hebrew and Israel’s history while serving his prison sentence.

“There is no doubt that [the Oct. 7] attack was planned to damage Israel’s resilience and the confidence of all Jews in the world, not only Israel,” Palmor said. “Sinwar knows what the Holocaust is and what is Jewish and Israeli identity. He knows how antisemitism works… He knows all of our triggers and references.”

As such, Palmor scoffed at those who say that Oct. 7 was revenge for Palestinians who are “humiliated at checkpoints” and want to humiliate Israelis in return.

Instead, she said, “there was something medieval about it, barbaric in a way that is not even from our time – beheading, sexual violence… It’s a pogrom. Sinwar wanted to take the Jews back 76 years, to make us weak again…All of these things were done to bring us back to the mindset of vulnerable, humiliated Jews, which also increases antisemitism.”

The body cameras worn by Hamas and used to document the attack and the subsequent posting of the videos on social media was part of their plan “to hurt the resilience of Jewish people and Israelis, terrorizing them through visuals and not just the murder,” Palmor said.

She referred to reports that Israeli welfare authorities have prepared contingency plans for a scenario in which young, female hostages return pregnant, and said: “That’s a pogrom. You enter the village, burn it down and rape the women. It’s not a war from our time – not that there’s such a thing as a civilized war.” 

Palmor is also chairwoman of the board of NATAL – the Israeli Trauma and Resiliency Center, whose work with Israelis and Diaspora Jews has become acutely relevant since Oct. 7.

“When we’re asked who could develop post-traumatic stress disorder, you first think about all of the 18,000 people living in the Gaza envelope who were at home, who saw people murdered, whose homes were burned down and members of their family and community held hostage,” she said.

However, she added, “We know as a fact that many people who don’t live there but watched intensively experienced trauma.”

For example, parents of participants at the Nova party who were on the phone with their children for hours, listening to the gunfire, and felt helpless have experienced PTSD.

“This was exactly what the Jewish state was supposed to change,” Palmor said. “We were supposed to become Jews who can defend themselves…have sovereignty and are in a place where your identity is not a source of vulnerability.”

Palmor argued that many young Israelis “didn’t think about their Judaism or even struggled against it, but now because of the rise of antisemitism, they can’t leave Israel and run away from it… They realize they can’t escape their identity. They’re Jews.

“It was a shock for an entire generation that thought antisemitism was a problem of the Diaspora and not connected to them,” she said, using her son, who is in graduate school in the U.K., as an example. “And there’s the shock of a generation convinced that they had the most moral army in the world and the most daring and sophisticated security forces to wake up to a reality in which they can’t run away from their Jewish, Israeli identity and are made to feel like the vulnerable, weak Jew instead of the sabra, and muscular Jewry.”

Palmor said that even some Diaspora Jews have shown post-traumatic symptoms after watching footage of Oct. 7, and have been in contact with NATAL’s helpline, available 24/7 in Hebrew and more limited hours in English and other languages. 

As the daughter of a diplomat who has lived in different countries in Europe and South America while her father represented Israel, ”I know what it’s like to be a Diaspora Jew,” Palmor said. “Oct. 7 is a direct hit to the assumption that if an antisemitic government rises, you can go to Israel.”

NATAL has given guidance on mental health for first responders in the U.S. over the years, but since the Oct. 7 attack, it has also worked with Jewish community professionals on building resilience in the community. 

Palmor is a member of the Meta Oversight Board, which is akin to a Supreme Court for Facebook, Instagram and Threads, in that it is the final forum to appeal Meta’s decisions to remove content or leave it up. The Oversight Board makes binding decisions on Meta’s content moderation standards. 

The board is reviewing Facebook’s policy on the expression “from the River to the Sea,” and is accepting public comments on the debate until May 21. Palmor noted the recent resolution by the House of Representatives that declared the phrase antisemitic.

While she cannot describe the inner workings of the Oversight Board, she noted that there are four recent decisions that are relevant to Israel and the war. One is for Meta to be more active in removing Holocaust denial from its platforms. Another was about the most moderated word on the platforms, the Arabic word “shaheed,” or martyr. While Israelis and other Westerners may view it mainly through the prism of terrorism, the term can be used for anyone who dies. The Oversight Board told Meta not to presume the word is always related to terror and to be more nuanced in its moderation and transparent about its standards.

In recent months, the Oversight Board reversed orders to take down videos of Noa Argamani being kidnapped by Hamas terrorists and of children in Shifa Hospital in Gaza. They decided that “in times of crisis, we need to allow posts that raise awareness,” Palmor said.

Generally, “You can’t show people humiliated like Argamani, you can’t glorify terrorism, like in the Argamani video, and you can’t show people injured, like at Shifa,” she said. “But in a time of crisis, it’s different. There was no regular media in Shifa. You need to make exceptions. We need videos so people can identify the hostage. There are people whose fates are unknown. And there was a denial of the hostage-taking, so in that context, it is important to raise awareness.” 

Palmor said that people are not familiar with the moderation standards on social media platforms, and will blame a Jewish conspiracy when their violations are addressed.

“Pro-Palestinian users who are blocked for even the most prosaic reason have tried to use that to prove their antisemitic theories,” she said. “If a user writes ‘all Jews are murderers,’ and he gets a warning, he might say this shows Jews control the media. But you’re not allowed to say ‘all males are violent,’ either.” 

“Online antisemitism is not just unpleasant – it can translate into real-world harm,” she said.

Antisemitism on social media should not only be thought of in terms of a spike in content targeting Jews, Palmor said. She has been the target of anti-Israel campaigns since she joined the Oversight Board as one of its original 20 members in 2020, and that has continued. She also pointed to “an antisemitic campaign since Oct. 7 against Jews and Israelis” working for major tech companies.

“There are many alumni of [elite IDF intelligence unit] 8200 in tech, which is the most natural thing in the world…but it feeds all the conspiracy theories that Jews care only about themselves and have all the power,” she said. “They forget what a tiny percentage we are of the world’s population. They adapted their antisemitism to the world of social media.”