Hopefully a good start to negotiations for peace.
this post was submitted on 24 Nov 2023
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Why did Israel have Palestinian hostages?
They don't.
Hamas demanded the release of convicted prisoners. Most are for relatively minor violent offenses like throwing stones at police or soldiers. Many of them are prosecuted under military law, as they may not be citizens of Israel, which has been a point of criticism.
They do. Some NGO's estimates think that up to 12000 Palestinians are held by Israel, a huge chunk without trial nor conviction. But it includes nearly 500 children, some as young as 12 years old. Your CNN article is a bit more conservative citing over 8,000, 350 children and 3,000 without trial. But Israel is not exactly transparent with their process and a lot more are missing with suspected detention. They also regularly torture and rape all the Palestinian prisoners, including the children, or “prisoners under 18 years old” as Israel likes to call them.
EDIT: Grammar.
Try to ask again, but do you have a source for all of these very specific statistics and claims?
Well let's use our brains, shall we.
CNN quotes the Palestinian Commission for Detainees and the Palestinian Prisoner's Society. Let's go looking into their reports. Last Palestinian Prisoner's Day (April, 17), the PPS reported at least 4,900 confirmed detainees with over 1,000 “administrative detainees”, which is Israeli code for “we detained them because they're Arabs”.
However, by that same date, Al Jazeera reported that in just 4 months of 2023 there had already been 2,300 new arrests, with new arrests happening daily.
Now, later this year the Palestinian Authority reported that there's been almost 5,000 new detainees, almost all administrative, since October 7th alone.
The number of prisoners has now risen to more than 10,000 people, Palestinian officials said on Thursday afternoon.
Well, this numbers do seem all over the place and seem to not add up. Why don't we try to find another source, let's say a Jewish source. There's this B'Tselem people, what do they say:
At the end of 2020, the IPS adopted a new policy and stopped providing B'Tselem with the requested figures. Instead, it has since published some data on the IPS website every three months. […] at times, some Palestinians are briefly held in military facilities. The figures from the military are received with a significant time delay and offer no details regarding inmates’ legal standing. The following figures were provided or published by the military and the IPS, so responsibility for their accuracy lies with them.
Well, how about the detention conditions. I'm sure it's not that bad. Let's look at Amnesty International first:
Amnesty International has for decades documented widespread torture by Israeli authorities in places of detention across the West Bank. However, over the past four weeks, videos and images have been shared widely online showing gruesome scenes of Israeli soldiers beating and humiliating Palestinians while detaining them blind-folded, stripped, with their hands tied, in a particularly chilling public display of torture and humiliation of Palestinian detainees.
“One of the Israeli officers who came, approached me and kicked me on my left side, then jumped on my head with his two legs pushing my face further into the dirt and then continued kicking me as I was head down, into the dirt, with my hands tied behind my back. He then got a knife and tore all of my clothes off except for my underwear and used part of my torn clothes to blindfold me. The beating to the rest of my body did not stop, at one point he started jumping on my back – three or four times – while yelling ‘die, die you trash’ … in the end before this finally stopped, another officer urinated on my face and body while also yelling at us ‘to die’.”
Oh, bother. I guess you're right, I was talking out of my ass. Things are actually way worse than I made them out to be.
As I mentioned, it has been a point of criticism. I'm afraid I don't have sources for everything you've claimed here, but I'd be interested in seeing them. Why is there such disparity in the numbers? Why does CNN not use the NGO numbers if they are reliable?
Stone throwing is a common form of protest in Israel and rarely results in serious injury. Nonetheless, it carries up to 20 years prison sentence. There is a ridiculously high conviction rate, and little or no legal representation, minors are often interrogated without parents, etc. etc.
It's probably not accurate to call them "Hostages." More like wrongful conviction? I'm not sure the best term. Probably why the article avoids it.
If they're the result of an illegal, internationally condemned occupation, lack conviction and are ethnically motivated to politically subjugate a group of people. They are hostages.
Even if all of that's true, which we can disagree about, that's still not the definition of a hostage. Maybe the term you're looking for is political prisoner. Words have meanings, and you can't just make up new definitions to suit the situation that best aligns with your politics.
Well, let's look at the definition of Hostage, according to the Merrian-Webster dictionary a Hostage is:
a: a person held by one party in a conflict as a pledge pending the fulfillment of an agreement
b: a person taken by force to secure the taker's demands
Interesting, let's look further, at the Encyclopedia Britannica:
a person handed over by one of two belligerents to the other or seized as security for the carrying out of an agreement or for preventing violation of the law of war.
Fascinating. Let's contrast this with what Britannica says about Political Prisoners:
a person who is imprisoned because that person’s actions or beliefs are contrary to those of his or her government. […] In practice, political prisoners often cannot be distinguished from other types of prisoners.
Well, considering that the majority of Palestinians detained by Israel are held by the army as military prisoners as they are not considered citizens, therefore they didn't even had any political rights or are considered under the government jurisdiction to begin with anyway. I would say one term applies, but the other doesn't. I agree that, words do have meanings. You can't just make up new definitions to suit the situation that best aligns with your politics.
Good news.
Thanks Uncle Joe.