Contrasting reality: Treatment of Israeli and Palestinian prisoners
The Al-Qassam Brigades released footage showing the handover of three Israeli women. (Photo – video grab)
Jamal Kanj writes in The Palestine Chronicle on 20 January 2025:
The release of three Israeli women held captive in Gaza on Sunday attracted significant global media attention. However, there was comparatively limited coverage of the freed Palestinian women, who had been kidnapped and detained by Israel without charge. This disparity reflects the normalization of the dehumanization of Palestinians, perpetuating a narrative that enables Israel to murder more than 46,000 Palestinians with impunity.
Initial medical assessments by the Red Cross and Israeli doctors indicated that the women were in good health, suggesting they had been treated well during their captivity. Their accounts speak of humane conditions with access to food, water, and shelter. Israel captives were afforded medical care and sustenance when Israel starved Palestinian children, murdered doctors and burned down hospitals.
The Israeli women were treated with dignity during their captivity. In contrast, a United Nations report highlights the mistreatment of Palestinian women in Israeli jails, and how they are “subjected to sexual assault, stripped naked, and searched by male Israeli army officers,” and threatened with sexual violence. The same report also noted that Israeli soldiers took photos of female Palestinian detainees “in degrading circumstances” and threatened to post the images online to further humiliate and exert control over them.
The wellbeing of the released Israeli captives—despite the devastation in Gaza at the hand of Israel bespeaks of the humane values of their captors. Without a doubt, their visible appearance reveals that they had enjoyed what the majority of Gazans did not have access to, under the malevolent Israeli siege, such as food, fuel to keep warm, or safe shelter to protect them from Israeli bombs and the elements.
Meanwhile, a video of the released Khalida Jarrar, a Palestinian woman prisoner leader, shows her struggling to walk—a contrast to the image of her before she was kidnapped by Israeli occupation forces in December 2023.
The care shown to Israeli prisoners is the polar opposite of the treatment Palestinian prisoners received in Israeli custody. Among them, detained Palestinian doctors tortured to death not for carrying a gun, but rather for holding a scalpel in the operating room to treat the injured, possibly including Israeli captives.