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.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
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.
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 bitch
So what would you call it when people are violently taken form there home by an occupying force, are not charged with or convicted for any crime by a court of law and are not granted access to any legal representation?
Because that is what Israeli "Imprisonment" of Palestinians in the Westbank looks like. Oh and of course the women and children are raped and people are tortured.
"We.. reaffirm our adherence to our demands and the national demands of our people; with a permanent ceasefire, the withdrawal of the occupation army from the entire Gaza Strip, the return of the displaced to their areas and places of residence, intensification of the entry of relief and aid, and the start of reconstruction," the Islamist faction said.
Not a single one of those seems unreasonable in the slightest and I can't see why any of them should be withdrawn.
Because if they were serious about negotiating they would give on some points, the same goes for the Israeli government. Tbh to me it seems like neither Hamas nor the Israeli government has any interest in a ceasefire or pause or whatever you want to call it. This ongoing conflict serves their individual power agendas well.
They gave on some points back in November, and Israel broke the ceasefire and killed unarmed Palestinians. They don’t trust Israel to uphold their end once again.
Handing them a surrender please note and calling it a cease fire. Their demands are reasonable. Israel and the US's demands are capitulation.
Here. I break into your house. Steal your shit and hold your wife at gunpoint and then tell you to accept things as they are, your stuff is mine and I continue holding your wife at gunpoint but promise not to pull the trigger. Do you agree to my ceasefire? Course you fucking dont.
But your not the one getting shot at so you can sit in your fucking chair and rip some liberal bullshit about ceasefire. They are using language to fuck with you and you don't have a moral backing to tell the difference. Just words.
Agreed. Israel is going to the meetings but their proposals amount to "give us back the Israeli hostages, we'll give you a few hundred of the thousands of Palestinians we're imprisoning, and then we'll go back to killing you mmkay?" Even their ceasefire proposals are a) temporary and b) don't stop the terrible conditions of apartheid/hostile occupation the Palestinians were living in for decades before Oct. 7th.
There will never be permanent ceasefire because Hamas dictate that Palestine, an area in which, over 2000 years, have been living more than dozens of ethnicities (i.e. Christians, Jews, Muslims, Ancient Greeks, Ancient Romans, Turkish, British…), is religiously and exclusively belong to only Arabic Muslim Palestinians.
Downvoted not because I defend Hamas (which is indeed awful) but because the premise of your post is a lazy, overused attempt to deflect criticism of Israeli crime. Where is the poster defending Hamas? Hamas isn't even mentioned. He's condemning Zionist propaganda and Israeli refusals to stop killing which is completely factual and an ethical stance. Take your strawman elsewhere.
Since you’re writing uneducated nonsense and I’ll just bluntly assume you’re an Israel supporter. Here’s a copy-paste of my previous comments.
Israel became an actual state in 1948 by displacing 750 000 Palestinian people and murdering many (men, women and children). Laying sieges, bombarding villages and population centers, setting fires to homes, properties and goods. Planting mines among the rubble to prevent any of the expelled people from returning (source: The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine by ilan Pappé).
Now Hamas did not exist until 1987, they became an actual group only in 1987 because of all the actions Israel had done from 1948 up until 1987. Which is approximately 39-40 years after what Israel had done to the Palestinian people.
From this we can conclude that Hamas did not start this but Israel did and that Hamas is fighting back.
Israel is currently doing:
Stealing land
Ethnic cleansing
Genocide
Calling Palestinians rats, animals and more cruel things
Wanting to erase the entire Palestinian race
Lying to the world
They think they are “superior” than Palestinian people
They think and say that Palestinian people are, the “inferior” race
Apartheid
Sent Palestinian people jail/ prison for no reason (even kids)
Beat Palestinian people for no reason or provoke to “get a reason”
Who’s the actual terrorist here?
I condemn both Israel and Hamas but if Israel had not stolen the land and murdered people from 1948 up until now. They (Hamas) would not even exist today. Hamas has become so violent, hateful and such because the world is just watching and doing nothing while Palestinians are getting murdered and humiliated on a daily basis.
Hamas dictate that Palestine, an area in which, over 2000 years, have been living more than dozens of ethnicities (i.e. Christians, Jews, Muslims, Ancient Greeks, Ancient Romans, Turkish, British...), is religiously and exclusively belong to only Arabic Muslim Palestinians:
Palestine is the land of the Arab Palestinian people, from it they
originate, to it they adhere and belong
Palestine is a land whose status has been elevated by Islam
Palestine is an Arab Islamic land. It is a blessed sacred land that has a
special place in the heart of every Arab and every Muslim.
Israel declaration of independence document, in the other hand, respect the multiethnicity of this area, and dictate that:
it will ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex; it will guarantee freedom of religion, conscience, language, education and culture; it will safeguard the Holy Places of all religions; and it will be faithful to the principles of the Charter of the United Nations.
No stop this is a pro Iranian theocratic dictatorship community! Hamas are nice people that absolutely would never literally stone people to death for saying nice things about democracy or asking for elections.