Israeli 'hostages' and Palestinian 'prisoners': the implicit propaganda
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Once again, the ceasefire agreement in Gaza is in shatters. After a short lull, Israel resumed its genocidal raids with what independent observers call occupation and colonization continuing. The obnoxious and self-righteous Zionist government is in no mood to relent the bombardment on innocent civilians. Thousands of people, including women and children, who returned to the ruins of their soil from the tents with renewed hopes, now have started fleeing their land again to uncertainty. Expulsion and exodus –part and parcel of the Palestine community is playing out once again.
Meanwhile, two words that often pervade in the air need particular attention. It shows the hypocrisy and the double standard of the world media. Very often these coinages go unnoticed in the emotional aspect of storytelling. Israeli hostages and Palestinian prisoners are the rather naïve coinage that deserves special note. It may sound natural, Hamas, a militant organization forcefully took away 1200 people, most of them Israelis on October 7, 2023. The hostages have been kept in an undisclosed place. No doubt, they are hostages, because, they have been held up by armed men illegally and to be released only when some demands are met. And for the Palestinian Prisoners, what's their plight? How did they become prisoners rather than hostages? Interesting.
There the double standard kicks in. Israeli forces have rounded up thousands of Palestinians from the occupied West Bank and Gaza since the Hamas incursion. And these detainees have been put in prisons for months without trial. Many of them had already been in jail for years. According to B’TSELEM, a human rights organization based in Israel, currently there are 9619 Palestine detainees in Israeli prisons. Interestingly, they are called prisoners, a rather innocuous term, sounding as though they were convicted through due process. In reality, these detainees are hostages in all respects.
They have not been brought before a judicial authority, there is no fair trial even now. Nobody knows how many detainees are there in the IDF custody. The Jewish military has detained them for allegedly involving in illegal activities. The only reason why they are in prison is because they are from Palestine. This blatant lawlessness has been described as legal arrests. An act twice removed from reality, if we go the George Orwell way with a literary context.
A country built up on Zionism must have its own propaganda and narratives to orchestrate its self-righteousness. The ugly part is the role played by the so-called independent international media in mega-phoning the same narratives. Even the Indian media is in line with their global counterparts.
The dividing line between hostages and prisoners is very evident. A prisoner has to be brought before a legal authority and tried. There are two types of detainees in IDF (Israel Defense Forces) and IPS (Israel Prison Service) custody, Political prisoners and Security prisoners. The women and children are treated separately. Those who have been dubbed as security prisoners will be kept in military prisons without any trial or legal assistance indefinitely. These prisoners are hostages in all respects. If a person is kept by force illegally, indeed he or she is a hostage. The parameter is the same for Hamas hostages and Palestine Prisoners.
When media call Palestinian 'prisoners' and not 'hostages', it automatically carries an implicit message that they have broken some law or have done something illegal. In fact, they have been seized from the occupied West Bank and Gaza by Israeli forces under the cover of security threats. Further, nobody knows exactly how many have been in IDF and IPS prisons except from the data Israel provides. A dispensation that depends much on propaganda rarely spells the facts.
The statistics provided on the website of BTSELEM, list the following details.
There are 9619 detainees in both IDF and IPS jails. Among them are 1782 serving sentences, 306 detainees,1881 detained under illegal combatants’ law, 2323 detained until the conclusion of legal proceedings, and 3327 admin detainees.
These figures are official data provided by the government, the website says. The reality presumably may be much higher.