The Western press endlessly repeats the word "hostages" to refer to Israelis captured in the context of the war, but carefully avoids using the same term for the thousands of Palestinians kidnapped and imprisoned by the Zionist regime. This difference is neither coincidental nor semantic: it reveals the hypocrisy of a discourse designed to criminalize Palestinian resistance and justify the crimes of the occupation.
A hostage is a civilian held outside of a military context, generally as a means of political pressure or exchange. A prisoner of war, on the other hand, is a combatant captured in the context of an armed conflict. Both are covered by the Geneva Convention, but Zionism and its media allies manipulate language to impose a moral narrative: theirs are "innocent victims," while the Palestinians are "terrorists."
The truth, however, is very different. Israel holds more than 14,000 Palestinians, including children, women, and civilians, in its prisons without trial, many subjected to the administrative detention system, an illegal practice that allows a person to be held without charges or the right to defense.
And the difference in treatment between them is abysmal.
A captured Israeli receives medical care, adequate food, and constant humanitarian monitoring. The media and international organizations mobilize their entire machinery to talk about him.
The Palestinian prisoner, on the other hand, is mistreated, tortured, deprived of medical care and contact with his family, and often held in inhumane conditions. Meanwhile, the world remains silent, and the powers that proclaim themselves defenders of human rights look the other way.
Palestinian combatants do not capture civilians on a whim, but within the framework of a national liberation war against an occupying power. Palestinians detained by Israel are political prisoners and prisoners of war, victims of a state that systematically violates international law.
Language, like territory, is also a battlefield. Calling an Israeli a hostage and a Palestinian a terrorist is manipulating the truth and whitewashing the occupation. That is why we must insist: there are no “Israeli hostages” and “Palestinian terrorists”; there are occupiers and occupied, oppressors and oppressed, colonizers and resisters.
Palestinian prisoners are prisoners of war and conscience, symbols of a people who do not surrender. And as long as there is a single Palestinian behind bars, the word freedom will remain the name of our struggle.
Palestinian Union of Latin America - UPAL
October 22, 2025
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