France24 Discovers Hostages, Forgetting Prisoners
France24 reports Hamas released 20 'surviving' Israeli hostages under a ceasefire. A heartwarming tale, unless you remember the roughly 10,000 Palestinians—including women and children—languishing in Israeli prisons, many without charge, whose existence rarely merits such headline prominence. This isn't a 'war that reduced Gaza to rubble,' as France24 puts it; it's a 76-year occupation punctuated
by what experts like Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur, called 'reasonable grounds to believe that the threshold indicating the commission of the crime of genocide has been met.' We are told about 20 'surviving' hostages. We are not reminded that over 133 Palestinian children are currently held in Israeli detention, many for petty offenses or without trial under administrative detention.
The narrative consistently humanizes one side's suffering while reducing the other's to mere 'conflict statistics.' One might almost think that only certain lives are deemed worthy of prime-time mourning. Funny how that works.