By Juan Cole / Informed Comment
Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – Al Jazeera reports that Qatar successfully brokered the exchange of 50 Israeli hostages held by Hamas for 150 Palestinians held in Israeli jails (who are also hostages, as I will explain). The deal, which was approved by Israel’s national unity cabinet on Tuesday evening, also provides for a four-day humanitarian pause in Israel’s land and air assault on Gaza, and permission for hundreds of aid trucks to bring in water, food and other necessities to Gaza’s Palestinians. Some 500 trucks used to enter the Gaza Strip daily, but that number has been cut to a handful or sometimes none at all by the Israeli authorities. Gaza’s population, under economic blockade since 2007, is deeply dependent on imported staples.
Hamas took some 240 hostages during its horrific October 7 attack on Israel, which killed 1200 persons, 1,000 of them innocent non-combatants. The machine-gunning down of innocents at a music festival, other attacks on non-combatants with small arms, and the firing of unguided rockets at civilian cities are all grave war crimes, as is hostage-taking.
The Israeli government responded by cutting potable water and electricity off to the entire 2.2 million people in Gaza, all but 30,000 or 40,000 of them innocent non-combatants, and half of them children. It then launched an intensive aerial bombardment of densely populated building complexes, of hospitals, schools and other infrastructural facilities, killing an estimated 13,300 persons and wounding tens of thousands. A majority of the population has been made homeless and displaced, perhaps 1.5 million persons. Gaza’s one million children are suffering from hunger and have been deprived of potable water. Most of these Israeli actions constitute war crimes as defined in the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, and they also fit the definition of genocide in that document, ratified by over 120 countries worldwide.
The detainees being exchanged are women and children.
So, let me return to the question of whether this is a hostage exchange on both sides.
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Israel often arrests and imprisons Palestinians arbitrarily or for thought crimes such as working for human rights, according to the United Nations. OHCHR wrote last year about a “trend in which human rights defenders and humanitarian workers are detained by Israeli authorities for prolonged periods and subjected to different forms of pressure to admit guilt in the absence of compelling evidence, as an attempt to curtail their human rights and humanitarian work.” It added, “The Working Group on Arbitrary Detention has also stated that under certain circumstances, widespread or systematic imprisonment or other severe deprivation of liberty in violation of international law may constitute crimes against humanity.”
The Special Rapporteur for the UN on Palestine wrote in a recent report that “since 1967, over 800,000 Palestinians, including children as young as 12, have been arrested and detained under authoritarian rules enacted, enforced and adjudicated by the Israeli military. Palestinians are subject to long detention for expressing opinions, gathering, pronouncing unauthorised political speeches, or even merely attempting to do so, and ultimately deprived of their status of protected civilians. They are often presumed guilty without evidence, arrested without warrants, detained without charge or trial and brutalised in Israeli custody.”
Israel is holding 6,704 Palestinians, many of them arrested on the flimsiest of pretexts. The number of detainees includes over 2,000 in what it is pleased to call “administrative detention.” That is where someone is arrested and imprisoned without charges, a trial, or sentencing. Administrative detention orders have a term of one to six months, but they can be indefinitely renewed.
Moreover, Israel arrests as many as 500 minors each year, including children as young as nine and ten, keeping the bulk of them in military brigs, and about 150 in civilian prisons. They stand accused of mistreating these children while they are in custody. Most are guilty of sassing Israeli soldiers or police, though some are stone-throwers.
These people have been effectively kidnapped by the Israeli state and are hostages, not prisoners.
Juan Cole
Juan Cole, a TomDispatch regular, is the Richard P. Mitchell collegiate professor of history at the University of Michigan. He is the author of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam: A New Translation From the Persian and Muhammad: Prophet of Peace Amid the Clash of Empires. His latest book is Peace Movements in Islam. His award-winning blog is Informed Comment. He is also a non-resident Fellow of the Center for Conflict and Humanitarian Studies in Doha and of Democracy for the Arab World Now (DAWN).