• Limonene@lemmy.world
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    7 months ago

    Why does the article call the people held by Israel “prisoners”, but the people held by Palestine “hostages”?

    • CarbonIceDragon@pawb.social
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      7 months ago

      I mean, having a hostage generally implies your intent is to hold that person captive in exchange for a demand being fulfilled, after which point you at least claim that you will release them. Presumably, Israel doesnt intend or claim that it will release those it has imprisoned even if it gets what it wants, so calling them hostages wouldnt really be accurate. One could call the people held by Hamas prisoners too I suppose, since that just implies them to be held against their will, but as they are explicitly being held in order to be used as a bargaining chip, calling them hostages adds more information about the situation than just calling them prisoners too would.

      • GrymEdm@lemmy.world
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        7 months ago

        You make sense, and I sort of agree so I won’t downvote and just add my bit. The “prisoners” are definitely being used as negotiation leverage in every discussion with Hamas.

        • SuckMyWang@lemmy.world
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          7 months ago

          I know this goes against the grain of what is being portrayed but a prisoner is also someone who has done something wrong where a hostage is totally innocent

          • idiomaddict@feddit.de
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            7 months ago

            In that case, given that many of the people kept by Israel have never seen the inside of a courtroom, that would be a biased use of “prisoner.”

            • SuckMyWang@lemmy.world
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              7 months ago

              I agree there would be more innocent people than average in those prisons. I’m not under any illusion there aren’t some really awful people in there too.

              • idiomaddict@feddit.de
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                7 months ago

                There definitely are, but that doesn’t mean Israel is justified in locking them away without due process.

    • GrymEdm@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      Israel calls the system it uses to imprison people without trial or even charges “administrative detention”. It’s hostage taking under a sanitized name and in terms of #'s Israel is provably many times worse than already-terrible Hamas.

      “Before October 7, the number of Palestinians held by Israel under administrative detention was already at a 20-year high. According to the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem, there were 1,310 Palestinians imprisoned without charge or trial at the end of September, including at least 146 minors. Since then, Israel has dramatically increased its use of administrative detention, pushing the number of detainees to over 2,000 within the first four weeks of the war. (That’s out of a total of roughly 7,000 Palestinian prisoners.)”

      People are often imprisoned for no other reason than Israelis don’t like them. Sometimes it’s social media posts. The average length of detention without trial or charge is a year. So if an Israeli soldier doesn’t like you being free, you can lose a year of your life being abused in prison for no other reason. There is an appeals process, but a report showed appeals failed 98.8% of the time from 2015-17 and there were no successes at all in 2023. "The overall figure is outrageous,” Montell said. “This is a patently illegal practice. These people should be given a fair trial or released.”

      • itslilith@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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        7 months ago
        • Palestinians are often “arrested” on dubious grounds and held without trial
        • They are given no legal representation and often tortured
        • Not much to add here, except that proper medical treatment is one hell of a lot harder in a place that’s actively being bombed
        • There’s no attempt at habilitation being made towards Palestinian prisoners. They’re not even given a due process.

        source for the first two

        another source, pre-Oct7

        another source about the torture

        So, how are they not hostages?

      • SulaymanF@lemmy.world
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        7 months ago

        Israel forcibly dragged Palestinians out of their homes and took them to unknown locations. Arrested versus abducted is a distinction without a difference.

        Israel isn’t rehabilitating anyone in West Bank or Gaza, they are keeping them in cramped rooms with no access to lawyers or families and are held months without charges.

        Your comment just doesn’t reflect reality. Ben-Gvir invited reporters to see prisoners and bragged that he’s intentionally starving them in captivity as revenge for hostages.

      • nogooduser@lemmy.world
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        7 months ago

        Point 1 l: that is just semantics so not really relevant. Hamas could have easily said that they arrested the Israeli hostages for a crime and it wouldn’t have changed anything.

        Point 2: I’m not sure that the Palestinians held without charge have any functional rights.

        Point 3: That’s just an assumption on both sides of this conflict. Hamas do have access to medical professionals and it is in their best interest to keep the hostages alive. Obviously, Israel does also have access to medical professionals but I’m not sure that the Palestinians have free access to them either. I’d hope that Israel would give medical attention when it’s needed but I don’t know.

        Point 4: That’s just rubbish as a general definition of prisoner around the world and the Palestinian prisoners are definitely being used in the negotiations.

      • merthyr1831@lemmy.world
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        7 months ago

        The Israeli prisoners were detained and arrested.

        The Israelis held by Hamas have been given many more rights than the average Palestinian prisoner.

        This is an outright lie, Palestinians are being amputated because of zipties to their limbs

        Again, Israel has no interest in “rehabilitating” its hostages, whereas Hamas is specifically offering to release theirs.


        At worst this is hostages on both sides. Your assessment only proves how much more hospitable Hamas have been to its captives than Israel, even at a time of war and famine brought on by Israel’s onslaught.

      • SmilingSolaris@lemmy.world
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        7 months ago

        Abduction and arrest are identical. An arrest is abduction by the state renamed to honor their monopoly of violence.

        Prisoners and hostages have as much rights as the holding entity says they do.

        This is you just guessing on how Hamas handles their prisoners. Also isn’t necessarily the same. I can tell you as a former Texas department of criminal justice officer that denying inmates medical checkups is common. Both officially and unofficially. There’s an inmate in solitary who hasn’t had a checkup hes been asking for for a year because no one who interacts with him bothers to actually do it. Go fuck yourself with that one

        Loooooooool that’s fucking hilarious. Go to prison and experience your rehabilitation removed