Aletho News

Who gets to be a hostage? The language that legitimises Palestinian captivity

By Jwan Zreiq | MEMO | December 17, 2025

The answer lies deeply entangled within global biases in how violence and captivity are framed. Consider two seemingly similar terms: “hostage” and “prisoner.” Hostage evokes an image of innocence violated; a life unjustly taken. Prisoner implies process, legality, perhaps even guilt. A prisoner, after all, tells us less about the person held captive than about the system that confines them. But what happens when the system itself is one of oppression and racial apartheid? Should we blindly adopt these terms without questioning the power structures that deploy them?

The answer here lies within the global biases in how violence and captivity are framed. For instance, consider Israeli soldiers like Matan Angrest, who were captured from his tank following October 2023. International media outlets, such as The New York Times, consistently describe these incidents like Matan as being “kidnapped from his tank,” a phrase that emphasises personal vulnerability while intentionally sidestepping the soldier’s combatant status. This framing shifts focus, drawing on narratives of personal suffering rather than the broader political and military context. As these soldiers are released, they are often publicly reintegrated as civilians and family figures, and some, like Edan Alexander, announced their intent to resume his service in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). These statements and the media’s celebration of their return shape perceptions of their humanity, painting IDF prisoners of war as victims of violence rather than active participants in the system of oppression and apartheid against Palestinians.

In contrast, the media reduces Palestinians to the category of “prisoners,” a term that pretends to give legality while erasing the reality of their captivity. Across the West Bank, Israeli forces routinely conduct raids targeting men, women, children and the elderly with neither charges nor trials, a process that is at once arbitrary and normalised. Israeli forces take these individuals hostage through a system designed to make indefinite imprisonment routine under the legal label of “security measures” and “administrative detention.” Violence, home demolitions and the deliberate cultivation of fear accompany these operations, while Israel systematically takes over the surrounding lands to expand its settler colonies.

Right now, thousands of Palestinians remain hostages in Israeli prisons, where they endure systematic torture. The numbers speak for themselves. Prior to recent releases, more than 10,000 Palestinians were held in Israeli prisons, including at least 3,500 in administrative detention without trial. The number of political prisoners had doubled, rising from 5,250 to nearly 10,000. From rape and torture to electric shocks and the full range of degradation that no human being should ever endure, this constant assault on the Palestinian body and soul is inseparable from the system that detains them. Yet, despite overwhelming evidence that Israeli forces arbitrarily hold many Palestinians, the world calls them merely “prisoners.”

One might wonder why Israel bothers with even putting up with the terms of legality; after all, this is a regime whose very logic is apartheid and colonisation. Each raid, each detention, is a small yet indispensable step in the relentless machinery of land seizure. Israel maintains the fiction of legality because international law requires it. The label “prisoner” thus functions to sanitise violations of international law that are, in reality, structural and deliberate. This terminology transforms oppression into procedure, erases the moral weight of captivity and normalises systemic violence. It governs not only how we perceive the victims of violence but whose pain we deem worthy of recognition.

In this discourse, the Palestinian experience is characterised by collective endurance, an abstract suffering with little room for individual human stories. By contrast, Israeli suffering is personalised, humanised and sanctified. Such language, which distinguishes between “hostage” and “prisoner,” produces profound inequalities in empathy and legitimacy, reinforcing power imbalances and shaping international opinion and perception.

The Red Ribbon Movement rejects the sanitised language that permits this violence to continue. The red ribbon is visible refusal, a refusal to accept the terms “administrative detention” and “security measures” for what amounts to collective hostage-taking designed to terrorise an entire population and facilitate ongoing dispossession.

Dr Mustafa Barghouti calls on people worldwide to join the Red Ribbon Movement to wear red ribbons in solidarity with Palestinian hostages held in Israeli prisons. This visible act of refusal demands that we interrogate the language that permits this violence to continue.

The urgency of this moment demands immediate action and solidarity. We return to the question the labels themselves preserve: who is deemed human enough to be a hostage, and who is simply a statistic?

The red ribbon answers: Palestinians held in Israeli prisons are hostages of apartheid, and the world must recognise this truth now, not later, not eventually, but in this moment of ongoing violence and captivity.

December 17, 2025 - Posted by aletho | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Full Spectrum Dominance, Subjugation - Torture | Human rights, Israel, Palestine, Zionism