Foreign Minister Avigdor Liberman indicated that there would be no more terrorist releases in Israel on Sunday, speaking in the wake of the abduction of three yeshiva students from Gush Etzion.
"There will be no releases for those Palestinian terrorists sitting in Israeli prisons - not as a 'gesture' and not for any other reason," Liberman stated to IDF Radio Sunday morning.
Calls to permanently ban the practice of releasing terrorists have been escalating since news of the kidnapping first broke on Friday, with many blaming the policy for the rise in terrorism in Judea and Samaria and for providing incentives for terrorists to kidnap more Israeli citizens.
On Saturday night, the call was echoed by former Israel Security Agency (ISA or Shin Bet) Chief Yuval Diskin.
"We should stop releasing terrorists for kidnapped soldiers, or releasing terrorists instead of implementing a construction freeze [in Judea and Samaria - ed.] during peace talks with the Palestinians - it encourages more kidnappings," Diskin wrote on Facebook.
Earlier this year, Israel agreed to release 104 terrorist prisoners as a "gesture" to the Palestinian Authority (PA) and a precondition to peace talks.
A total of 78 have been released; the remaining twenty-six terrorists were not, after the Palestinian Authority torpedoed the peace talks by making unilateral steps to apply to international agencies.