All hostages, Israeli and Palestinian, must be released from captivity
People attend a demonstration in support of and in solidarity with Palestinian prisoners held in Israeli custody, Nablus in the West Bank in 2023
Gideon Levy writes in Haaretz on 6 July 2025:
The most urgent emergency measure required now, besides ending the massacres in Gaza, is the rescue of all the captives, Israelis and Palestinians, from the abysmal conditions in which they are held. The Gaza tunnels or Megiddo Prison, Hamas captivity or Shin Bet captivity, both are nearly indescribable evil. It’s a pity that not a single relative of the Israeli hostages has called also to release the Palestinian hostages, or at least to ease their incarceration conditions.
One cannot judge these families in their time of pain, but given so many reports of the conditions in which Palestinian detainees are held in Israel, one might have hoped for a hint of humanity and compassion, especially in people who fear so much for the fate of their loved ones.
Not only can Israel’s sadism affect the conditions in which our own captives are held, but there is also this simple moral consideration: When Israel abuses the hostages and detainees that it holds in the way that it does, it loses all moral right to call for the release of its own hostages.
There is no point in comparing the detention center at Israel’s Sde Teiman military base to the tunnels under Khan Yunis since it is impossible to compare one horrific suffering to another. In both locations, human beings are being held in subhuman conditions such as no human being deserves, not even members of Hamas’ elite Nukhba brigade.
No person has the right to abuse human beings in this manner. The only valid comparison is between the abusers: In Gaza, they are members of an organization that is considered a murderous terror organization, and in Israel, it is by a state that purports to be democratic.
Only a person without a conscience could fail to be shaken by Hagar Shezaf’s exemplary description of the incarceration conditions of Palestinian detainees and hostages: So-called administrative detainees, held without trial, are hostages, and there are thousands of them.
The investigative report by Loveday Morris and Sufian Taha in The Washington Post last week should have also rocked this country to its core. A total of 73 Palestinian hostages and detainees have already died in Israeli prisons – a shocking number, with only the indifference with which it has been received being more shocking. Where are the days in which the death of a detainee in prison was considered a scandal? The number of dead people in Hamas captivity isn’t close to this number.
Shezaf described a disturbing story of torture, starvation, lack of medical attention and violence – all committed by the state. Starvation by the state, brutal beatings and sadism under the auspices of the state. This is not Itamar Ben-Gvir, it’s the State of Israel. Why is it necessary to starve people to death?
By what right is it permissible to deny medical care to 2,800 incarcerated people suffering from the scourge of scabies, or to thousands of others who contracted intestinal illness in these sites of starvation and epidemics?
In the body of 17-year-old Walid Ahmed, intestinal inflammation and scabies were found, and there was almost no fat or muscular tissue left. He was starved to death because of a Molotov cocktail and stones he had thrown, just like the ones thrown by settlers in Kafr Malek. The Israel Prison Service executed him without trial.
The Washington Post spoke with detainees who had come out of that hell and with lawyers who had visited prisons, and the picture they described was the same. They, too, described the systematic policy of starvation and the denial of medical care. “It is Guantanamo,” one of them said. It is worse than Guantanamo if you consider the number of deaths. Photos of skeletal and crippled Palestinians who emerged from Israel’s prisons over the last year and a half tell the entire story. They constitute a grave indictment against the State of Israel.
In the 1980s, I managed to visit Megiddo Prison once and met with Palestinian prisoners, when the Israel Defense Forces still operated the prison. The conditions then were humane and relatively decent.
But it is not only the conditions that have deteriorated unrecognizably since then. Another egregious thing happened: Then, Israel was ashamed of the abuse and tried to hide it. Now, Israel is proud of its sadism and displays it for all to see, including on shameful prison visits by Israeli television correspondents. Sadism toward Palestinians has become part of public relations. It even brings in votes in the Knesset elections.
This article is reproduced in its entirety