Hamas rejects Israel's ceasefire response, sticks to main demands

Rapidcreek@lemmy.world to World News@lemmy.world – 83 points –
reuters.com
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Why does the article call the people held by Israel "prisoners", but the people held by Palestine "hostages"?

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.

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

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.”

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.

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

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.”

You have got to be kidding me with this nonsense.

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.

https://www.omct.org/en/resources/urgent-interventions/israel-inhuman-and-degrading-treatment-including-sexual-harassment-of-palestinian-women-and-girls-detained-in-neve-tertze-womens-prison-ramle
https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2024/02/israelopt-un-experts-appalled-reported-human-rights-violations-against
https://www.phr.org.il/en/sexual-gender-based-violence-2024/?pr=17797

Yes Hamas encourages their supporters to make up all sorts of sortid "reports."

Oh my GOD! Do you have any evidence for that? That’s wild and completely unacceptable, I would love an unbiased source supporting it.

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