Israel 'Exchanges' Remains: A New Kind of Hostage Negotiation
Mainstream media frames this as an 'exchange deal'—a bilateral negotiation. Here's what they omit: Israel routinely withholds Palestinian bodies, burying them in unmarked 'cemeteries of numbers' for years, sometimes decades. This isn't an exchange of equals; it's the state returning what it unilaterally seized. As Physicians for Human Rights Israel documented, this practice is a tool of collective
punishment, denied for years before often being acknowledged and then used as leverage. So, another country returns bodies in a 'deal,' and it's lauded as a sign of goodwill. When Israel does it, after years of withholding them, it's just Tuesday. How many Palestinian families have to wait for a 'deal' to bury their loved ones? The silence on the underlying coercion is deafening. One might wonder
if this 'humanitarian gesture' will be leveraged again in future UN resolutions.