The High Court of Justice dismissed two petitions on Thursday against the hostage deal that was approved on Tuesday.
The first petition was submitted by We Chose Life, an organization of bereaved families and people who have been affected by terrorism, as well as Herzl and Merav Hajaj, whose daughter was murdered in a terrorist attack, and Eliyahu Livman whose son is being held hostage in Gaza.
The second petition was submitted by a group of people from Jerusalem including two who were injured in terrorist attacks and Jerusalem's Deputy Mayor Aryeh Itzhak King.
The petitions urged the High Court to block the deal which includes the release of 300 female and underage terrorists in return for at least 50 hostages.
One of the petitioners, Moria Cohen, was stabbed by a 14-year-old terrorist who has been named as one of the potential people to be released in the deal.
The petitions claimed that the High Court should block the deal because only the president can pardon security convicts who are in the middle of serving their sentence and that releasing the prisoners was a security risk for Israel.
They also claimed that the agreement discriminated between different hostages because Hamas did not commit to returning all the hostages in the agreement.
The second petition added that the release of prisoners posed more danger because the terrorists who came from east Jerusalem would be allowed to return.
The High Court has limited powers
The High Court responded that it does not have the authority to get involved in government peacetime decisions such as these. In regards to the claim that only President Isaac Herzog can pardon the terrorists, the court said that their release would not necessarily denote a pardon and that the government could use the same mechanism it did in the Gilad Shalit deal where more than 1,000 terrorists were released.
As to discrimination between hostages, the court argued that since the government has stated that its mission is to return all the hostages, the deal was not considered discrimination.
As such, the High Court rejected the petitions without requiring a response from the government.
These are the second and third petitions against the deal to be rejected by the High Court.
On Wednesday, the court rejected a petition submitted by the Al-Magor Terror Victims Association and the Schijveschuurder family who lost relatives in the 2001 Sbarro restaurant bombing.
The petition was dismissed due to a lack of factual and legal basis.