Israeli Hostages & Palestinian Prisoners
BIG PRESS
!!!
BIG PRESS !!!
Editorial
By Matt Annett
Five minute read
In the past week, it's been hard to avoid news about a massive hostage exchange between Hamas and the Israeli government. Al Jazeera has reported that the official exchange was about 1,950 Palestinians for just 20 Israelis (plus the remains of another 28 deceased Israelis).
It seems hard to read these numbers as anything other than representative of the sheer disproportionality of this conflict - one state with a highly trained and highly funded military, inaccurately purporting itself to be the ‘only democracy in the Middle East’, indiscriminately bombarding another state who can barely manage to be recognised as such, and has been purposely crippled and occupied for the better part of the last century.
Media outlets around the world have been using some specific terminology for the last two years: captive Israelis in Gaza are ‘hostages’, but captive Palestinians are ‘prisoners’. There is immense power in this branding, and it's never been more on display than in these past weeks since the so-called ‘peace deal’.
The term ‘hostage’, as other outlets have pointed out, indicates victimhood - a hostage is often a non-combatant who is held against their will by a violent party, and to blame that hostage for their position would be nothing short of inhumane. The majority of Israelis who were taken hostage on October 7th were, it seems, certainly in that category.
‘Prisoner’, on the other hand, evokes a different feeling, right? Although a hostage and a prisoner may both be placed in a small room against their will and not allowed to leave, there is a strong implication that a ‘prisoner’ is a criminal, and has thereby only ended up in this situation thanks to their own actions. They are a wrong-doer, a no-hoper, so we put them in a little room and punish them for their transgressions and prevent them from wreaking any more havoc on civilised society.
The egregious error that arises here, then, is the fact that a huge number of these detained Palestinians are not criminals - they’re held with neither charge nor trial. Anadolu Agency reports that 11,100 Palestinians were being detained as of September 2025, which includes 400 children and 3,577 people confirmed to be held without charge. Israel has not released details of how many of these detainees are being charged.
Many of these detentions are allowed under Israel’s 2002 Unlawful Combatants legislation, which uses dangerously vague wording to imprison people such as Fahamiya al-Khalidi, an 82-year-old Alzheimer’s patient, and her carer for six weeks. Al-Khalidi is just one of around 6,000 Palestinians who’ve been held as ‘unlawful combatants’, fewer than a quarter of whom have been identified by Israel as actual combatants, even using the legislation’s irresponsibly loose definition.
This is all to say that the purposeful use of these terms is part of the collective cowardice of media outlets and governments around the world - a subtle and subconscious effort to paint Israelis as only victims and Palestinians as all criminal aggressors. As usual, nuance is left on the cutting room floor, and the true story of the Israeli government’s genocidal aggression is papered over with claims of victimhood and a distinct and inhumane lack of regard for Palestinian lives and freedom.
Selective Curiosity in Australian Media
Our media in Australia has been fascinated with this comparatively minuscule number of people being imprisoned by Hamas, and often seems to treat mentioning them as if it’s a get-out-of-anti-Semitic-jail-free card. Over the past weeks, there have been tears of joy by Sky News employees at the prospect of this handful of Israelis returning home and claims that this exchange marks ‘the end of the war’.
However, these outlets do not share the same curiosity about the thousands of Palestinians who’ve been imprisoned, murdered, tortured, humiliated and abused sexually, physically and mentally in the last 2 years, let alone since the establishment of the state of Israel. There is no demand by international governments to return the thousands of Palestinians suffering in Israeli jails safely home, and there is seemingly a serious lack of onus placed on the Israeli government to release this hoard of detainees in order to facilitate an end of the current conflict. Why does our media celebrate the end of the war only when the Israeli prisoners are released, but seems to care little about the massive number of Palestinian prisoners who are still being held without charge?
On October 17th, Guardian Australia shared two posts on Instagram - first, a small collection of accounts from Israelis who were held by Hamas, then anecdotes from Palestinians who were held by Israel. The former post speaks of beatings and rough treatment, but also of one captive who spent his days playing cards with his captors. The post also frames ‘starvation’ as if it were part of Hamas’ evil torture techniques, and not a bi-product of Israel’s intentional deprivation of aid and food from everyone in the Gaza Strip.
Guardian Australia’s Instagram post on October 17th.
The latter post is more graphic. It describes in vivid detail some of the torture techniques employed by IDF captors - instead of playing cards, Palestinians were hung from walls and sprayed with cold water, according to former captive, Mohammed al-Asaliya.
It was Never about Hostages
Israel and its supporters have trotted out the ‘bring them home’ line at every opportunity in the last 2 years. Israeli counter-protesters attend Pro-Palestine and anti-genocide rallies around the world holding signs with details of Israeli hostages - their names, ages, aspirations - as if the Pro-Palestinian side of the street was in favour of these hostages being taken and held. In all my time attending and reporting on this issue in and around Australian cities, I have never heard anything that could be considered support for Hamas’ holding of these people.
This war, despite what Zionists and sympathisers continue to claim, was never simply about hostages. If it was, Netanyahu would have accepted any of the deals that the Israeli government was offered at multiple points throughout this conflict. In February of 2025, Hamas reportedly made an offer: all hostages released in exchange for a permanent ceasefire and IDF withdrawal. A similar deal was allegedly offered in July 2025 - to both offers, Israel responded with dismissal and continued bombardment.
If this was just a war about these hostages, the IDF would not be using the immensely barbaric and unprecise military tactics that they are. The IDF has, in its brave and delicate conquest to rescue innocent Israeli civilians, killed a swathe of them - it turns out that levelling buildings, many of which contain said hostages, is not a safe and effective way to ‘bring them home’. Hamas reports that ‘over 70’ Israeli hostages have been killed, but this number has not been corroborated. Popular Israeli newspaper Haaretz found that Israel has killed 20 of these hostages and severely endangered the lives of 34 more.
If the war was simply about hostages, these people would likely still be alive. If the war was about hostages, the unspeakable number of children may not have been murdered by the IDF. From an outsider perspective, this reporter can only conclude that this war does seem to be about the intentional killing of a people and the aggressive and violent seizure of land. Now that the hostages have been released, the Israeli government and their supporters can no longer claim otherwise, and the Australian government and media are running out of sand to stick their heads into.
