The hostages' families should have been jailed to shut them up, says former US citizen who was an Israeli spy

• Jonathan Pollard is a former US Navy intelligence analyst who was imprisoned for spying for Israel.
• Pollard said that the families of Israeli hostages should have been jailed to shut them up.
• "I was dead set against these 'kidnapped' posters because each one of them was a poison dart," he said.

Jonathan Pollard, a former US intelligence analyst imprisoned for spying for Israel, has called for hostages' families to be silenced and arrested.

Pollard told Israeli media that the families of Israeli hostages should have been jailed to shut them up. He also said posters of the captives should never have been hung up.

"When Israel declared war, the first thing that the government should have done was declare a state of national emergency and told all the hostages: 'You will keep your mouth shut or we will shut them for you,'" Pollard said.

He said the Israeli government should have prevented the hostages' families from "interfering" with their management of this war.

He implied that the hostages' families were being "used by the international community" or "by our own leftists" as a weapon against the Israeli government.

"If that means imprisoning to silence certain members of the hostage families, then so be it — we're in a state of war."

"I was dead set against these 'kidnapped' posters because each one of them was a poison dart," said Pollard.

Pollard is a convicted spy who spent three decades in a North Carolina prison for providing top-secret information about the US to Israel.

The former Navy intelligence officer — using his Top Secret and Sensitive Compartmented Information access to national defense information — provided Israel with thousands of pages of US intelligence on military and technical intelligence on the Soviet Union, Arab states, and Pakistan.

Pollard's emigration to Israel in 2020 was the culmination of years of lobbying by the Israeli government to secure his release.

Some Israeli hostages are due to be released later today as a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas comes into effect. At least 50 of the roughly 240 hostages held by Hamas are set to be released in exchange for 150 Palestinian detainees over four days over four days.