After The Prisoner Exchange, Over 11,000 Palestinian Hostages Will Remain: Media Silence And The Double Standards Of Humanity.

As the world holds its breath ahead of the latest Gaza ceasefire and prisoner exchange, Western headlines once again proclaim the “return of all hostages.” Yet this phrase, echoed across CNN, BBC, and The New York Times, conceals a bitter truth: more than 11,000 Palestinian hostages remain in Israeli jails, many of them children, journalists, doctors, and civilians abducted from their homes and refugee camps.

For Palestinians, the very framing of the story, that hostages are only Israelis, and that Palestinians are “detainees” or “security prisoners”, reflects the moral hierarchy embedded in global media and diplomacy. The world waits for the release of 48 Israelis still held by Hamas, while nearly 20,000 Palestinians have been arrested since October 2023, and their torture, deaths, and disappearances barely warrant a mention.

A War Of Words: The Invisible Palestinian Captives.

Israel’s own data confirms that 11,100 Palestinians remain imprisoned across its military and intelligence facilities, according to the Palestinian Prisoners’ Society (PPS) and Wafa News Agency. Around 400 are children and over 2,000 are held under administrative detention, a system allowing indefinite imprisonment without charge or trial, based on “secret evidence.”

Many of those seized after October 7, 2023, were civilians from Gaza, detained in military camps and makeshift desert prisons such as Sde Teiman, Anatot, and Ofer. Human rights groups, including B’Tselem, Physicians for Human Rights–Israel, and Euro-Med Monitor, have documented systematic torture, sexual abuse, and starvation in these facilities.

“We have testimonies of detainees who were forced to eat insects, stripped naked for hours, beaten with rifle butts, and denied water for days,” said Amani Sarahneh, spokesperson for the Palestinian Prisoners’ Society.

“This is not detention. It’s retribution, collective punishment disguised as security.”

Since October 2023, at least 78 Palestinian detainees have been killed under Israeli custody, according to Addameer Prisoner Support and Human Rights Association. That number exceeds the total Israeli hostages who died in Gaza, many of whom, as Israeli investigations themselves confirmed, were killed by Israeli bombings, including the catastrophic strikes on Jabalia, Nuseirat, and Rafah that targeted alleged Hamas command centres.

Yet this fact, that Israel’s own bombardments killed many of its captives, rarely appears in international coverage. Western outlets continue to describe these deaths as “tragic consequences of war,” avoiding attribution or accountability.

“It’s the asymmetry of empathy,” said media scholar Dr. Maha Nassar of the University of Arizona.

“The Israeli captive is individualised, humanised, named. The Palestinian prisoner is abstracted, dehumanised, and reduced to a number. One is a victim of terror, the other a potential terrorist.”

Exchange Or Illusion? How Israel Re-Arrests The Freed.

The narrative of the “humanitarian exchange” has also been weaponised. During the first truce in November 2023, Israel released 39 Palestinian women and minors in exchange for Israeli captives. Western media framed the event as a “moral gesture,” with almost no mention that Israel simultaneously arrested 310 new Palestinians, effectively nullifying the deal.

In some cases, those released were rearrested within days. “They came for me again at 3 a.m.,” said 17-year-old prisoner ‘Alaa M. from Hebron, whose story was verified by Addameer. “They told me, ‘We’ll teach you a lesson for celebrating your release.’”

Israel’s pattern of re-arresting freed detainees has been documented by the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention, which described it as a “cycle of punitive detention designed to break the social and psychological resistance of occupied people.”

This time, under the new ceasefire framework, 250 Palestinian detainees with life sentences are to be freed, alongside 1,700 Gazans taken after October 7, though Israel still refuses to classify them as prisoners, instead labelling them as “unlawful combatants.” The figure of Gazans held in secret detention sites is estimated at 15,000, though Israel denies keeping official records.

“The humanitarian dimension of this exchange is being twisted,” said Omar Shakir, Israel and Palestine Director for Human Rights Watch.

“Israel is not only holding thousands arbitrarily, it is hiding them from the world, cutting off access by the ICRC, and maintaining total opacity.”

The Ceasefire And The Shadow Of Impunity:

The latest regional ceasefire plan, brokered by Türkiye, Egypt, and Qatar, aims for a phased halt to hostilities, troop withdrawal, and reciprocal prisoner releases. But the imbalance is staggering: 48 hostages held by Hamas versus over 11,000 Palestinians detained by Israel.

This disparity underscores the moral asymmetry of the negotiations. President Erdogan declared that “no ceasefire can hold without addressing the root injustice, the occupation and the imprisonment of an entire people.” Egypt and Qatar echoed similar warnings, insisting that Israel’s compliance must be “verifiable and irreversible.”

Saudi Arabia has gone further, linking any long-term peace to formal recognition of a Palestinian state on the 1967 borders, while Jordan and the UAE have pledged logistical and financial support for post-war reconstruction.

“This is the first ceasefire not micromanaged by Washington,” noted Leila Hatoum, a Beirut-based journalist and regional analyst.

“It’s the Middle East asserting itself, and testing whether Western governments can stomach a framework they didn’t control.”

Media Audit: The Hierarchy Of Suffering.

An audit of Western coverage during the last two exchanges reveals an unmistakable bias: