What about all the Palestinian hostages?
Western media is dominated by headlines about the Israelis held hostage by Hamas in the Gaza Strip. The Israeli military placed the number of hostages at 199 in a press conference on Monday, according to the Times of Israel. “The world’s never seen a mass kidnapping quite like this”, ran an ABC News headline on Saturday.
The Oxford Languages defines “hostage” as “a person seized or held as security for the fulfilment of a condition”.
By this definition, the 2.3 million Gazans are also hostages. “Humanitarian aid to Gaza? No electrical switch will be lifted, no water hydrant will be opened, and no fuel truck will enter until the Israeli hostages are returned home”, Israeli Energy Minister Israel Katz posted on X, formerly Twitter. On Monday, United Nations official Philippe Lazzarini said that Gaza is being “strangled”.
Every day, Israel kills hundreds of these Gazan hostages. The world’s never seen a mass kidnapping quite like this.
In fact, Gazans have been held hostage since 2007—sixteen years—as collective punishment for their decision to elect Hamas to administer the Palestinian territories. But now it’s worse: the exits are sealed. The Israeli military is raining bombs on the territory, and at time of writing is reportedly preparing a ground invasion.
It is not a rescue operation; it is collective punishment.
Further, Israel has kidnapped imprisoned Palestinians for decades. The Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions campaign reports that 1 million have been detained since 1967.
The latest figures from Addameer, the Palestinian Prisoner Support and Human Rights Association, show that Israel currently holds 5,200 Palestinian political prisoners. Hamas has demanded the release of these prisoners in exchange for the release of the hostages they have taken.
The Palestinian prisoners include more than 1,200 “administrative detainees”. Administrative detention allows the Israeli military to hold prisoners indefinitely without charge or trial, and without access to the allegations made against them. Since 2002, there has not been a single month in which Israel held fewer than 100 Palestinians in administrative detention.
The abuse of civilian prisoners is well documented and includes the use of torture. B’Tselem, an Israeli human rights organisation, reported in 2017:
“The prison authorities do not allow them to shower, change clothes, brush their teeth or even use toilet paper ... In the interrogation room, they are forced to sit bound to a chair, without moving, for hours and even days on end.”
If you listen to what Israeli politicians say about Palestinians, none of this is surprising. When he thought the cameras had stopped recording during a 2001 interview, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said, according to conservative Jewish magazine Tablet, that his approach to dealing with Palestinians in general was to “beat them up, not once but repeatedly, beat them up so it hurts so badly, until it’s unbearable”.
On Monday, legislation allowing for the overcrowding of prison cells passed its first reading in Israel’s parliament, the Jerusalem Post reports.
Palestinian children are often imprisoned by Israeli military courts simply for throwing stones. A Save the Children study published earlier this year, based on interviews with 228 former child detainees, found that 86 percent were beaten in detention and 69 percent were strip searched. Many were handcuffed and blindfolded in small cages.
Israel often targets figures important in the popular consciousness of the Palestinian resistance. This serves three purposes: taking them out of action, damaging morale and demonstrating that those who resist the Israeli occupation will be punished.
An example of this is Ahed Tamimi. Ahed was filmed standing up to Israeli soldiers throughout her childhood and became a popular symbol of Palestinian resistance. At the age of 16, she was imprisoned for eight months. “In interrogation, they didn’t treat me as a child or even a normal adult. They treated me as if I was not human”, she told the National, a United Arab Emirates-based media site, after her release.
The pro-Israel media has created a narrative that Hamas taking 200 hostages puts in the shade anything that Israel has done to the Palestinians. It’s not true. The world needs to turn its eyes to the 2.3 million hostages held by Israel in Gaza, and the 5,200 more held in Israeli cells. We need to demand their release from Israeli terror.
