In September 1997, Hadi Nasrallah, the son of the Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, was killed in a skirmish with Israeli troops. The Israelis hoped that with his body in their hands, negotiations for the return of the bodies of Israeli soldiers held by Hezbollah would accelerate. Yaakov Perry, the former head of Shin Bet, Israel’s internal security service, was in charge of the case at the time. “We were optimistic,” he told me when we recently spoke. “We thought it would bring a solution closer, but Nasrallah was indifferent. He instructed his men not to put his son’s name at the top of the list and to treat him the same as all the other fallen militiamen. Later I heard that when Hadi’s coffin arrived in Lebanon, his father lifted the lid, glanced at the body of his beloved son and closed it. Not a muscle in his face moved.” The president of German intelligence at the time, August Hanning, who mediated an eventual deal between Israel and Hezbollah, told Perry in bewilderment that although Nasrallah grieved deeply for his son, “the body is another matter. You Israelis have a very unusual attitude on this matter.”

The “sensitivity” of Israel to the body issue has led to the absurd situation in which Israeli soldiers occasionally find themselves risking their own lives — some have been killed in the process — in efforts to extricate the bodies of their comrades from battle, so that those bodies won’t become bargaining chips for future negotiations.

Maj. Gen. Yaakov Amidror served as a senior officer in military intelligence for decades and today serves as national security adviser to the prime minister. “I believe that it is right to endanger the lives of soldiers in operational actions in order to bring about the release of a living hostage or to get information,” Amidror told me in an interview in 2009. “But the important principle is not to conduct any negotiation for the bodies of abducted soldiers or for living hostages. Israel has trapped itself in an impossible position, in which it sacrifices vital security interests in order to return hostages or their bodies, and this exceeds all the limits of reason. If, for example, it was clear to Hamas or any other organization that we do not pay anything and do not negotiate, the motivation to kidnap would be significantly lower.”

Two days after Shalit’s abduction, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert declared in the Knesset that he and his government were “dealing with only one matter” — securing the release of Shalit. Olmert’s capitulation to Hezbollah’s demands for the remains of the two soldiers set a precedent for the high price to be paid for the bodies of Israeli M.I.A.’s. The weight of these deals made bargaining for Shalit’s freedom nearly impossible.

Because the Israeli government refuses to speak directly to Hamas, negotiations in the months following Shalit’s capture were mediated by senior officers of Egyptian intelligence, who at the time had an office in Gaza (they were expelled when Hamas took full control of the Gaza Strip in 2007). In December 2006, an outline of an agreement was reached, under which Israel would free 450 Hamas prisoners from a list that would be agreed upon by both sides. In a second phase, after Shalit was repatriated, Israel would release another 550 prisoners (making a total of 1,000), whom it would select itself. The only point of contention was over who was to be included in the first list. For reasons that are not clear, Israel insisted that Hamas draw up the initial list. When it did so, predictably including the names of its most prominent prisoners — figures the Israeli government had vowed never to release — negotiations immediately came to a halt and remained there for the next two years.

Then, in late December 2008, while Shalit languished in an unknown location in Gaza and after the cease-fire was broken, Israel launched Operation Cast Lead. The stated goal was to liberate communities close to Gaza from missiles that were being fired on them from the strip, and the Olmert government took pains to say that the operation was not intended to win Shalit’s freedom. And yet, immediately following the operation, Israel announced that there would be no new cease-fire with Hamas — that border crossings with Gaza would not be opened and supplies designated for the population would not be allowed through — until the Shalit problem was solved.

In March 2009, negotiations between Israel and Hamas were held in Cairo, under the auspices of the Egyptian intelligence agency. Hamas insisted on the release of many of its top prisoners and, with few exceptions, refused to agree to their deportation from the West Bank, another major sticking point, as Israel feared that the released prisoners would embark on another wave of terrorism. Meir Dagan and Yuval Diskin, the chiefs of the Mossad and the Shin Bet respectively, opposed any deal. They produced data showing that 45 percent of those released in previous prisoner exchanges returned to terrorist activity. One example was a member of Islamic Jihad, Luay Saadi, who was arrested in September 1999 for providing logistical assistance to terrorists in the West Bank. According to Shin Bet, after his release in the January 2004 Tannenbaum deal, Saadi set up a widespread terrorist network that led to the deaths of 30 Israelis and the wounding of 300. He was assassinated by Israel in 2005.