i want to reiterate i don't think israeli hostages have had the time of their lives and i don't think this ordeal was fun or easy for them but looking at how israeli hostages have been released by hamas and how palestinian hostages have been released by israel is a really dark-sided reality check on just how low the standards for israel have been to meet a basic threshold for humanity and yet it still failed
The Palestinians being released aren't hostages... they're charged or convicted prisoners
this is of course, not true. more than two-thirds of the prisoners released have not been convicted of any crime, and include those were not charged with anything at all.
even in the pdf released by the israeli government, compiled by journalist laura adkins, you can see most were arrested as minors and charges include "throwing stones" and "support for terrorism" and "threatened area security." Vox reports: "Since 1967, Israel has issued over 1,000 military orders that criminalize a range of activities in Palestinians’ daily lives, including waving political symbols like flags, being in certain areas without permits, and any kind of speech that can fit into a loosely defined charge of “incitement.” Citing decades of evidence, the Amnesty report outlined an “intentional Israeli policy to detain individuals, including prisoners of conscience, solely for the non-violent exercise of their right to freedom of expression and association, and punish them for their views.”
however, under israel's administrative detention even the more serious charges are held under "secret evidence" that israel does not allow many defendants nor their lawyers to access (when it allows them access to lawyers). in order to convict israel then holds trials in military courts without adequate representation, forces children who can't read hebrew to sign off on documents they don't understand and has a ~99% conviction rate. it extracts confessions under duress including torture of minors, withholds adequate treatment from injured detainees, often uses threats of arresting family members (particularly parents) to coerce confessions from children, without mentioning the habitual illegal use of punitive measures such as solitary confinement for years on end.
it is a separate legal system designed to strip palestinians of due process. israel is one of very few countries in the world to routinely charge minors and non-violent political prisoners in military courts. anyone remotely familiar with incarceration and remotely familiar with practices of administrative detention in the middle east knows exactly what kind of legal procedure this is, so this comment fully relies on the willful ignorance of outsiders. in layman terms, this is called a kangaroo court. here's a handy graphic that illustrates it:
and to help you visualize this on the ground, there is no shortage of images of how israeli occupation soldiers have treated palestinian children (on their own land, in their own supposed territory) across the years:
of course the argument goes "these children were terrorists" and so on and so forth but this 2015 report from amnesty highlights exactly how specious these accusations of "stabbing" and "attempted murder" can be under israeli occupation:
we've also seen the case of ahmed erakat, who was accused of trying to drive a car into a checkpoint and executed on the spot when forensic examination revealed otherwise. similarly, the case of israa jaabis who was accused of trying to detonate a bomb at an israeli checkpoint, while her family maintains that israeli forces firing indiscriminately at her car after an airbag malfunction caused a cooking gas tank to explode, leaving her disfigured after israeli soldiers left her to burn on the ground.
however, whether or not they charged or convicted actually doesn't matter. israel has no right nor authority to imprison or detain palestinians outside the occupied west bank under international humanitarian law. but it is israel's own high court of justice that gives it the legal pretext to do so under claims of security threat, which amnesty international and multiple other human rights groups have repeatedly found in violation of international humanitarian law. through legal loopholes such as expanding the territory and language of what constitutes "military zones" israeli soldiers in the west bank are given free reign to terrorize the population and simultaneously protect their illegal settlement expansion. there is some leeway for appeal that provides a veneer of legitimacy to this process, but it is overwhelmingly a fascist and unlawful system.
as one report points out, allowing real due process to palestinians who are accused of attacking occupation soldiers would then have to confront the legality of the occupation itself, which palestinians have the right to resist by any means necessary under international law (and under which soldiers and armed settlers are a credible and justified target.)
israel instead awards legal impunity to such armed settlers & soldiers in these settlements who provoke and kill palestinians constantly while palestinian prisoners are charged under an apartheid law, rendering all accusations, charges and convictions as null and void as convictions under syrian or north korean courts, for example.
finally, i leave you with this anecdote, which sums up just about everything illustrated above:
now the irony of it all is that even if these were convicted prisoners under some semblance of real due process, the manner in which israeli authorities have policed their release by pre-emptively arresting members of their family and community, forcibly removing the press, banning all celebrations, shooting live ammunition and killing people awaiting their release, and breaking the arms of teenagers and leaving them untreated for days before release is still unjustifiable, which was the purpose of this post lol.
