After nearly seven weeks in captivity, 24 hostages seized by Hamas in its deadly Oct. 7 attack on Israel are now free after crossing into Egypt. In exchange, Israel released 39 Palestinians hours later at the city of Ramallah in the Israeli-occupied West Bank.
The Palestinian prisoners were not captured. They have been arrested, charged, or convicted of crimes. Most are considered minor violent offenses like throwing stones at police or soldiers.
Edit: added "arrested, charged "
I haven’t seen a published source but reporters are saying 233 of the 300 on the list of potential releases haven’t been convicted. Apparently, 270/300 are kids (or teens if you’re too young to think of teens as kids) and 33 are women.
You wouldn’t expect a lot to be convicted. Israel allows six month detentions of Palestinians based on secret evidence with no trial and the ones on the list were picked by Israel and are presumably not considered threats. (Palestinians who do face trial apparently go to a military court with a 99.7% conviction rate. I don’t know if that means “show trials” or “only slam dunk cases” but it’s probably relevant.)
P.S. I condemn Hamas extra hard. No one needs to chime in saying Hamas hostages don’t get trials or whatever. We all know Hamas would answer the trolly dilemma by exploding the trolly and killing everyone.
But they were in captivity? Why even bring semantics into something like this?
They were arrested and jailed. The article should have done a better job not equating people convicted of crimes with people abducted from their homes as their families and neighbors were being murdered by a terrorist junta.
I’m guessing the author is trying to “represent both sides equally.”
Nelson Mandela was also arrested and jailed by an Apartheid state.
We have no way to know if these people actually did anything wrong.
There should be a presumption of innocence.
as a disclaimer, i don’t think i really know enough about the situation to comment on it holistically
that said, if a state wants to find a justification to convict somebody, it can find it
i don’t think that, in a war between two states, trusting what an instrument of one state says about an instrument of another is justification by itself