23.1.25
On Sunday (January 19), as the ceasefire in Gaza began, so too did the first phase of the key peace-making element of the deal — the return, over six weeks, of 33 of the remaining 100 or so Israeli hostages seized by Hamas and other militants after they broke out of the “open-air prison” that the Gaza Strip became in 2007, when Israel, having withdrawn its forces and dismantled its settlements in Gaza itself, essentially sealed it shut, imposing a relentless blockade by land, sea and air, and rationing everything, and everyone permitted to enter or leave.
In exchange, Israel has agreed to release thousands of Palestinians held in its gruesome and ever-expanding network of prisons, solely for Palestinians, that it has established over the last 67 years of its illegal occupation of Palestinian land in the Gaza Strip, the West Bank and East Jerusalem, known, collectively, as the Occupied Palestinian Territory.
251 hostages were seized and taken back to the Gaza Strip on October 7, 2023, a key aspect of the attacks whose purpose was largely obscured as Israel, and its compliant vassal states in the west, focused almost exclusively on the 1,139 people killed (mostly Israelis but also including 71 foreign nationals), and invented atrocities to justify the genocidal frenzy that followed; in particular, the notorious “40 beheaded babies” story that was pure fiction, as only 36 children were killed on October 7, only two of them were babies, and neither of them were beheaded.
For Hamas, the seizing of the hostages was at least as important as the deadly blow dealt to the oppressor through the killing spree, which, while reprehensible in and of itself, of course, cannot be seen in isolation from the tens of thousands of Palestinians killed by Israel since its blood-soaked founding in 1948 — 15,000 in the Nakba (“catastrophe”), the Zionist Jews’ initial conquest of Palestine, when 750,000 other Palestinians were also forced into exile, and tens of thousands in the decades since, including at least 5,300 (compared to 345 Israelis) in the 15 years preceding October 7, mostly during Israel’s periodic “wars” on Gaza, which were characterized, with stunningly malevolent dehumanization, as “mowing the lawn.”
Throughout the grinding, decades-long conflict between the oppressor and the oppressed, between the colonizer and the colonized, Hamas has used Israeli hostages as its only viable bargaining chip to secure the release of Palestinians from Israel’s prisons, where those imprisoned are held in circumstances that would shock the conscience, and lead to comparisons with the most brutal dictatorships, if they were undertaken by anyone other than the west’s beloved colonial-settler regime in Israel.
The grotesque lawlessness of Israel’s prisons for Palestinians
Everything about Israel’s prison system for Palestinians is an affront to all recognized international standards regarding the deprivation of liberty, the definition and punishment of crimes, fair trials, and the adequate treatment of those detained.
It operates, fundamentally, on the basis of arbitrary terror, whereby individuals throughout the West Bank and East Jerusalem are arbitrarily seized, often in house raids or at checkpoints, and often, at an unspecified time in the future, arbitrarily released without ever having been charged, and with no explanation ever provided for their arrest in the first place.
Genuine, but overstated infringements of Israel’s “security” — children throwing stones at soldiers, for example — sometimes lead to those detained being charged, but not in civilian courts, which are reserved solely for Israelis, but in military courts, which, absurdly, have an almost 100% conviction rate.
Israel also widely uses “administrative detention” against the Palestinians, a hangover from British rule, under the Mandate that preceded Israel’s violent takeover of Palestine in 1948, whereby those detained are formally deprived of their liberty administratively — not judicially — via orders that can be indefinitely renewed every six months.
At least one million Palestinians — mostly men, but also women and children — have been imprisoned at various times throughout the occupation of the Gaza Strip, the West Bank and East Jerusalem in 1967, but although the entire system has been repeatedly condemned by the UN and other international bodies ever since, it remains fundamentally unchanged, a sweeping assault on all notions of justice that shatters Israel’s absurd claim that it is “the only democracy in the Middle East”, and exposes it as an oppressive apartheid state.
While inviting comparisons with prisons run by dictatorships, Israel’s prisons also invite comparisons with the prisons established by the Bush administration in its “war on terror”, and its remaining outpost at Guantánamo Bay, maintained by successive US presidents, where arbitrarily detained men and boys were held indefinitely without charge or trial (as is still the case with six of the 15 men still held as the prison enters its 24th year of operations), where those charged are put forward for military trials in a system designed solely for foreigners, and where those never charged with crimes have been reliant for their release on the outcomes of legally unenforceable administrative reviews; in other words, a system of “administrative detention.”
Noticeably, torture and abuse were also widespread at Guantánamo, as they are — and always have been — in Israel’s prison for Palestinians, although the ferocity and brutality of conditions in Israel’s prisons has increased markedly since October 7, 2023, under the command of Itamar Ben-Gvir, the thuggish head of the far-right Kahanist “Jewish Power” party, and the Minister for National Security (until his resignation when the ceasefire deal was agreed) in Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition government that came to power a year before October 7.
Alarmingly, immediately after October 7, Ben-Gvir banned all prison visits by the International Committee of the Red Cross (preventing any outside scrutiny of what was taking place), and, at one point, suggested that the solution to the post-October 7 overcrowding in the prisons, which he himself had caused, should be resolved through the extrajudicial executions of prisoners, because they were all “terrorists.”
Since October 7, those seized in Gaza — previously off-limits to the Israeli government — and suspected of connection with the attacks, however spuriously, have been subjected to particularly brutal treatment, some of which echoes the kinds of extreme violence to which the CIA subjected those detained in its post-9/11 network of “black site” torture prisons around the world.
Torture, rape and murder have been widespread, and those held have also been subjected to startling and persistent isolation, blindfolded, and almost entirely prevented from moving, as well as being prevented from praying.
The shamefully biased coverage of the hostage and prisoner releases
Despite the repeated condemnation of Israel’s prisons for Palestinians by the UN and other international bodies, and despite exposure of the horrendous increase in violence in the prisons since October 7 — even, occasionally, in the western mainstream media — when the first hostage exchange since November 2023 finally took place on Sunday, almost all western media coverage focused fawningly and obsessively on the three released Israeli hostages, who were all young women, while the 90 Palestinian women and children were largely ignored — just as had been the case during the hostage exchanges at the end of November 2023, and as though 14 intervening months of the most horrendous evidence of Israel’s crimes meant nothing, and Palestinian lives were still, compared to Israeli lives, not worthy of attention.
No one mentioned that the three Israelis had all been serving in the Israeli military, just as no one bothered to undertake any critical analysis of the circumstances in which the Palestinians were held, or why, when they were released, the Israelis looked healthy, while many of the Palestinians were gaunt shadows of their former selves, and had clearly been subjected to prolonged ill-treatment. No one also took any interest in the fact that Israel had teargassed those greeting the returning Palestinians, and has sought to prevent any celebrations of their return.
Of the 90 Palestinians freed, 78 were from the West Bank, while the other 12 were from Jerusalem. Two were teenage girls, 67 were women (ranging in age from 20 to 61), while the rest were all teenage boys, the youngest just 15 years of age. All but eight had been seized after October 7, and, as Reuters at least conceded in its reporting, most “were recently detained and not tried or convicted.”
In fact, as Israel’s +972 Magazine recognized, most of those freed had merely been detained “on suspicion of incitement and support for terrorism”, and not because of anything that could legitimately be termed “incitement” or “support for terrorism”, but often because of nothing more than social media posts criticizing Israel’s actions, or expressing support for the Palestinians.
Amongst them were numerous young female students, while the youngest were just 17 — Aseel Eid al-Yassini, who had been “detained after being shot in the foot at a protest”, and Rose Khweis who had been seized in May 2024 at Al-Aqsa Mosque, and had been “threatened with a sentence of 10 years in prison.” Seriously ill in prison, with a serious heart condition and high blood pressure, her health condition was so severe that she had required hospitalization. Aseel’s father, Osama Shadeh, told reporters, “My daughter was arrested on 7 November 2024 when she was protesting against the killing of Palestinian children in Gaza. She was waving a Palestinian flag. Israeli soldiers shot her in the foot and handcuffed her. They accused her of trying to stab the soldiers. The fact that she is being released now means that Israel knew that my daughter had done nothing wrong. Yet they kept a minor in jail for over a year.”
Some of those released had been sentenced, although the basis for their sentencing was a travesty of justice. 24-year old Tamara Abu Laban, for example, who was working and studying to be a medical secretary, was seized in East Jerusalem on November 10, 2023, on the basis of social media posts for which she eventually received a 16-month sentence.
Others seized were writers and journalists, whose only weapon against Israel was the pen — or the keyboard. 52-year old Dr. Zahra Khadraj, for example, who describes herself as “a Palestinian writer and novelist, owner of a resistant pen who believes in the justice of our cause and believes in God’s victory”, was seized in her home in Qalqilya in January 2024, while Bushra al-Taweel, 31, a journalist who advocates for the rights of Palestinian political prisoners, and had been imprisoned seven times since 2011, was seized at her home on March 7, 2024, and subjected to administrative detention.
Others were teachers, like Fatima al-Rimawi, 52, from Jericho, a trade unionist and kindergarten teacher for over 30 years, who was seized on January 2, 2024 for “incitement” on social media.
The most celebrated of the released prisoners — and the eldest — was Khalida Jarrar, 61, a longtime advocate for Palestinians’ rights. In shamefully poor reporting, the BBC described her as “a leader of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a group designated a ‘terrorist organization’ by Israel, the US and the European Union.” Noting that she had “been in and out of jail for much of the past decade”, despite only ever being “convicted of charges like incitement”, the BBC failed to recognize, as was at least recognized by the Guardian, that the PFLP was “a secular leftist faction that was involved in attacks against Israel in the 1970s but later scaled back militant activities”; in other words, when Jarrar was a child.
As Max Blumenthal explained on X, “Khalida Jarrar is a leftist political prisoner who has been tormented for years by Israel’s apartheid authorities for her human rights work. I remember frequently passing by her protest tent in Ramallah throughout 2014, where she was resisting an order of expulsion to the hinterlands of Jericho. She subsequently spent 59 months in prison until 2021, when she was denied temporary release to attend her 31-year-old daughter’s funeral. The charges Jarrar faced in the Israeli military’s kangaroo courts included attending a book fair and delivering a speech ‘against the Israeli occupation.’”
During her most recent imprisonment, which began on December 26, 2023, she was held in solitary confinement in a tiny call in which she struggled to breathe, and was clearly suffering from the effects of this torture on her release, although she is now recovering. When she spoke to the media on Monday, she said that the Israelis “have never been as harsh as they are now, be it the repeated assaults or constant use of tear gas”, adding that all the prisoners “were subjected to extreme harshness and physical assault in a deliberate and intentional attempt to humiliate and demean us,” She also said that the Palestinians in Israel’s prisons endure “poor quality and insufficient quantity of food, as well as the solitary confinement policy practiced by the occupation authorities”, and blamed the government, and, in particular, Itamar Ben-Gvir, for trying “to deal with the prisoners as if they are not humans.”
Highlighting the hypocrisy of the west in relation to the release of the Palestinian women and children on Sunday, Max Blumenthal also explained, “US corporate media will fixate on Jewish Israeli captives in Gaza while avoiding mention of Jarrar’s name. It cannot risk informing Americans that many of the prisoners which Hamas fought to liberate are not Hamas members at all, and are behind bars purely because they resisted occupation through political organizing.”
In addition, some of those released had already been freed during the hostage exchange that took place at the end of November 2023, but were then cynically re-arrested.
For further information — a full list of the names and ages of those released, for example, including where they are from and the dates when they were seized — see this Al Jazeera article. For photos and profiles of some of those released, see this thread on X by the informative Palestinian Captives account, and for photos of the release of the women and children, check out all of the entries from January 20 on the Samidoun Network account.
Just a drop in a bitter ocean of imprisonment
Now imagine all of the above being replicated hundreds of times, and you will get some idea of both the extent of and the arbitrariness of Israel’s prisons for Palestinians.
As the Guardian explained on January 20, “According to figures published by the Israeli NGO HaMoked, as of January 2025 there were 10,221 Palestinians in Israeli prisons. About 3,376 of them are held under administrative detention, while 1,886 are classified as unlawful combatants.”
The Guardian noted that the IDF and the Israeli government “say the measures comply with international law”, but failed to push back of that patently false assertion, because the concept of “unlawful combatants”, as anyone who has studied Guantánamo knows, is fundamentally nothing more than an excuse for holding people indefinitely without charge or trial, and without any rights whatsoever.
The Guardian also noted that Israel “has published a list of 734 prisoners from the West Bank, including East Jerusalem”, who are “due to be released under the deal” including those “jailed for lesser offences, or held in administrative detention”, as well as noting that “another 1,000 or so people from Gaza”, who were “detained during the war as ‘unlawful combatants’ without charge or trial”, are also scheduled to be freed.
Again, the description of “unlawful combatants” was repeated without criticism, while a notable absence in the Guardian’s coverage was an indication that it might be apt to regard many of these people not as either prisoners or “unlawful combatants”, but as hostages, many held specifically for their potential role in the freeing of Israeli hostages, and it also seems justifiable to regard many of those seized in the West Bank and East Jerusalem since October 7, 2023, but never charged, as fulfilling a similar role — also held as hostages, or as bargaining chips.
As the Guardian also noted, about 230 additional prisoners, “all serving life sentences for conducting or participating in deadly attacks against Israelis”, are also meant to be released, although they will be “permanently exiled and reportedly deported to Turkey, Qatar or Algeria.”
The next hostage exchanges are scheduled for this Saturday, when four more Israelis will be freed, and many more Palestinians, although, yet again, it is certain that almost no western media outlets will take any interest in the stories of the Palestinians, or what the details of their imprisonment reveal about Israel’s prison system, even though a recent report by the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem and Israel, was scathing about the multiple examples of war crimes and crime against humanity taking place in the prisons, as I discussed in my article, UN Report Condemns Unparalleled Violence, Including Torture, Rape and Murder, in Israel’s Unaccountable Prisons for Palestinians.
Phased hostage releases as the key to the ceasefire’s success
Although the west’s racist indifference is perpetually shameful and embarrassing, the most important aspect of the hostage exchanges is that, while they are taking place — carefully phased by Hamas to take place over several months — Israel cannot seriously contemplate resuming the genocide in Gaza that many still want.
Now that the hostages are center stage — after the successful efforts by Netanyahu, Ben-Gvir and the other far-right minister Bezalel Smotrich to sideline them since December 2023 in their insatiable hunger for the blood of Palestinian civilians — it is difficult to imagine any circumstances arising in which the genocidal assault can resume after its first six-week phase, as Netanyahu and Smotrich hope, and the remaining hostages are abandoned once more.
And in the meantime, as the extent of the devastation in Gaza becomes ever clearer, through photos and footage showing devastation at least as horrific as that in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the viability of Israel resuming its carnage in a land in which almost nothing is left standing, and it is exposed so nakedly as having plumbed almost unimaginable depths of vengeance and depravity, must surely mean that even its western collaborators would shudder at approving yet more destruction.
As negotiations begin for the second phase of the ceasefire — scheduled to come into effect at the start of March — we must all hope that Israel understands that its “war” is over, and that the reconstruction of Gaza must begin, just as we must also hope that its increasingly savage assaults on the West Bank in recent days are also curtailed through a lack of international support.
This is because, unlike in Gaza, evoking Hamas as a perpetual excuse for killing, through a deliberate refusal to distinguish between an administrative government and its military wing, cannot be allowed as an excuse for even more unbridled slaughter and colonial expansion in the West Bank, because Hamas is not, and has never been the government in the West Bank.
It may be naive to say this out loud, but it really is time for peace. Israel has taken Gaza to the brink of extermination, because it will not accept that the land it covets is Palestinian land, and that all of its violent decades-long efforts to subjugate the Palestinian population led to the events of October 7.
In July, the International Court of Justice issued a truly groundbreaking opinion, ruling that Israel’s entire 57-year occupation of Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem is, and always has been illegal, and ordering them to leave.
Israel and its supporters have all tried to pretend that this opinion doesn’t even exist, as they all conspire to erode or even erase the very concept of the United Nations and of international humanitarian law, but it is time for that particularly destructive path to be abandoned, and for Palestine to be free.
POSTCRIPT (January 28): On Saturday January 25, the second release of hostages took place, as four more young Israeli women, all soldiers, were freed in exchange for 200 Palestinians. According to the terms of the ceasefire deal, 30 Palestinian prisoners will be freed for each Israel civilian, and 50 for each soldier.
The 200 Palestinians freed were all men, and were all serving prison sentences, and in many cases life sentences, for what the Israelis call terrorism, but which, in the context of Israel’s 57-year occupation of the Gaza Strip, the West Bank and East Jerusalem, were undertaken by the Palestinian militants, in some cases, at least, as part of their legitimate resistance to occupation oppression and apartheid, the distinction between legitimate and illegitimate resistance generally relating to whether the targets were military or civilian.
The prisoners were all released from Ofer prison in the occupied West Bank, or from Ktziot prison in the Negev Desert. 114 were freed in Ramallah, in the the West Bank, while 16 were freed in Gaza, delivered to the European Hospital in Khan Younis to have their medical conditions assessed.
The other 70 — those regarded as having been convicted of the most serious crimes — were deported by Israel to Egypt, where they arrived on a number of buses, and were then transferred to Egyptian hospitals for treatment. While some of the freed prisoners released into Egypt will stay there, it is expected that others will be sent on to Algeria, Qatar or Turkey.
For the names of the 200, and the dates of their capture and sentencing, see this Al Jazeera article.
* * * * *
Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer (of an ongoing photo-journalism project, ‘The State of London’), film-maker and singer-songwriter (the lead singer and main songwriter for the London-based band The Four Fathers, whose music is available via Bandcamp). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (see the ongoing photo campaign here) and the successful We Stand With Shaker campaign of 2014-15, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (available on DVD here, or you can watch it online here, via the production company Spectacle, for £2.50).
In 2017, Andy became very involved in housing issues. He is the narrator of the documentary film, ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’, about the destruction of council estates, and the inspiring resistance of residents, he wrote a song ‘Grenfell’, in the aftermath of the entirely preventable fire in June 2017 that killed over 70 people, and, in 2018, he was part of the occupation of the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden in Deptford, to try to prevent its destruction — and that of 16 structurally sound council flats next door — by Lewisham Council and Peabody.
Since 2019, Andy has become increasingly involved in environmental activism, recognizing that climate change poses an unprecedented threat to life on earth, and that the window for change — requiring a severe reduction in the emission of all greenhouse gases, and the dismantling of our suicidal global capitalist system — is rapidly shrinking, as tipping points are reached that are occurring much quicker than even pessimistic climate scientists expected. You can read his articles about the climate crisis here.
To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to Andy’s new Substack account, set up in November 2024, where he’ll be sending out a weekly newsletter, or his RSS feed — and he can also be found on Facebook (and here), Twitter, Flickr and YouTube. Also see the six-part definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, The Complete Guantánamo Files, the definitive Guantánamo habeas list, the full military commissions list, and the chronological list of all Andy’s articles.
Please also consider joining the Close Guantánamo campaign, and, if you appreciate Andy’s work, feel free to make a donation.
Investigative journalist, author, campaigner, commentator and public speaker. Recognized as an authority on Guantánamo and the “war on terror.” Co-founder, Close Guantánamo and We Stand With Shaker, singer/songwriter (The Four Fathers).
Email Andy Worthington
Please support Andy Worthington, independent journalist:
7 Responses
Andy Worthington says...
When I posted this on Facebook, I wrote:
In my latest article, I look at the first of the hostage releases that took place as part of the Gaza ceasefire deal on Sunday, when three young Israeli hostages were freed, in exchange for 90 Palestinian women and children. Predictably, the western media focused almost exclusively on the Israelis, reinforcing the notion, entrenched over the last 15 months, that Palestinian lives have no value to western politicians and the mainstream media.
In fact, almost all of those released had never been charged with a crime, and many had only been seized and “disappeared” into Israel’s extensive prison network of brutal and fundamentally lawless prisons for Palestinians because of social media posts or taking part in protests, making them, in quite a fundamental manner, hostages as well.
The west’s indifference not only fails to credit Palestinian women and children with stories worth recounting; it also fails to examine or hold Israel to account for a truly repulsive prison system in which over 10,000 Palestinians are currently held, many without charge or trial, and many others under “administrative detention”, which can be endlessly renewed every six months without any trial ever taking place.
I also reiterate my hope that, because the hostage releases are phased over the next three months at least, Netanyahu cannot seriously contemplate resuming the genocide in Gaza that many still want, especially as the devastation in Gaza becomes ever more apparent, and, hopefully, as international bodies are allowed in to assist with the enormous humanitarian requirements of the surviving population, and to begin the plans for its reconstruction.
...on January 23rd, 2025 at 9:39 pm
As Gaza hostages freed, the west ignores the suffering of Palestinians in Israeli prisons - IndieNewsNow says...
[…] my latest article on my website, Gaza Hostage Exchanges: The 90 Freed Palestinian Women and Children Ignored by the Western Media, I look in detail at the first of the hostage releases that took place as part of the Gaza […]
...on January 23rd, 2025 at 11:07 pm
Andy Worthington says...
Sihaam Khan wrote:
The western media, being the mouth piece of contemporary western colonizers, simply confirms what we have read in our history books about the earlier European colonizers when they colonized the Americas and Africas in the preceding centuries: the value of the colonized peoples back then as are now have no value. Contemporary western powers would make their imperialist ancestors proud.
...on January 23rd, 2025 at 11:59 pm
Andy Worthington says...
It’s true, Sihaam, and it’s been so shameful and alarming to see the mask so willingly dropped, and the vile colonial monsters resurfacing so brazenly, especially for those of us from working class anti-imperial backgrounds who mistakenly thought that some sort of progress towards accountability and responsibility was being made as western countries became more multi-cultural.
...on January 23rd, 2025 at 11:59 pm
Andy Worthington says...
Sihaam Khan wrote:
Andy, it is better that the veil has been dropped. This allows for a complete picture and for all to also see the central role that “economics” plays in colonialism and also the role the “labour” class plays. Historically, it was always about control of resources and control of trade routes of all empires from the Neo-Assyrians and Achaemenids to the Parthians and the Romans and so on. Each subsequent empire learning from the preceding empire on how to ensure imperial longevity adopting and adapting various tools of control. For the more recent imperialist powers, we see the more oppressive tools being used to suppress those conquered to ensure this control. My apologies, I am transgressing here.
...on January 24th, 2025 at 12:01 am
Andy Worthington says...
On another note, our societies will eventually get to that point you mention as we have been moving in that direction. As long as individuals like yourself and others continue with your most important work, educating and bringing attention to social injustices that are connected in some way or the other. Apologies again for going off topic in my previous comment.
...on January 24th, 2025 at 12:01 am
Andy Worthington says...
No worries regarding the disgression, Sihaam. It’s always important for us to think about how we got to where we are, and as a instinctively pacifist white European, and also instinctively engaged in the class struggle, despite people probably reflexively thinking I’m “middle class”, it’s also crucial to still try and continue the process of understanding that, as you say, the means of control have become more and more oppressive. So many Europeans simply don’t understand how they’ve been blinded by propaganda not to understand that they too have been persistently exploited and abused.
Thanks so much for the kind words about my efforts. So much is connected, especially from a class perspective, I think – an unfinished project of breaking borders and finding transnational solidarity that far too many people don’t realize has been very deliberately suppressed over so much of the last 40 or so years.
...on January 24th, 2025 at 12:02 am