by Dr Sania Faisal El-Husseini

This work by Middle East Monitor is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. 

In light of Israel’s continued return of hundreds of Palestinian bodies who were killed under torture, blindfolded, restrained, bearing marks of abuse and fatal gunshots, many of them so mutilated that they were interred as unidentified, it has become essential to reopen the file of mass abductions, torture, and extrajudicial killings targeting Palestinians from Gaza. The scale and gravity of these violations require immediate investigation through all available legal, diplomatic, and humanitarian avenues to safeguard the tens of thousands whose fate remains unknown.

The disturbing images of Palestinian prisoners of war tortured to death were not the only scenes to shake Palestinians. Equally horrifying were the testimonies of civilian hostages recently released by Israeli authorities after establishing that they bore no affiliation to Palestinian resistance groups. These civilians describe harrowing abuse, severe torture, degrading treatment, humiliation, and assaults that violate their dignity, humanity, and personal honor, violations rendered even more acute within a conservative cultural context. The methods described reflect an extreme level of brutality, challenging the limits of human comprehension and constituting serious breaches of international humanitarian law.

The British newspaper The Guardian has disclosed the existence of an underground Israeli detention torture facility, while testimonies from civilians recently permitted to return to Gaza revealed the existence of additional similar sites. Israel continues to conceal thousands of civilians and combatants who disappeared from Gaza and its surrounding areas, withholding their identities, actual numbers, location, and fate. According to the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), Israel has denied all requests and blocked all attempts for access to visit them, an alarming sign of the opacity surrounding their safety.

Such practices amount to enforced disappearance and torture of protected persons under international humanitarian law, whether they are prisoners of war captured by Israeli forces during hostilities or civilians seized during the fighting, in occupied territory. These acts fall squarely under the legal framework of the Third and Fourth Geneva Conventions of 1949 and 1977 Additional Protocols, which apply fully in this context, and prohibit such violations unequivocally.

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Israel amended its domestic legislation after the 7 October attacks two years ago, to permit the authorities to prolong periods of detention and interrogation prior to judicial review. According to several Israeli attorneys who were granted access to prisons during the most recent hostilities, a significant number of detainees are civilians, and their detention orders are being renewed in short remote video sessions conducted without legal counsel. The process has deepened concerns about arbitrary detention and the erosion of fundamental legal protections, and has raised serious concerns under international human rights and humanitarian law, particularly regarding due process guarantees.

These developments unfold within an Israeli legal system that has long been criticised as discriminatory. Israel  systematically refuses to acknowledge the reality of occupying Palestine which widely internationally recognised,  affirmed by global courts, international organisations, and the overwhelming majority of states. In 2002, Israel incorporated the category of “unlawful combatant” into its national laws, a designation intended to deny Palestinian resistance fighters, affiliated with armed national liberation movements, the protections afforded the Third Geneva Convention and its First Additional Protocol. This constitutes a unilateral measure that stands in direct violation of Israel’s binding treaty obligations and customary international humanitarian law.

Israel’s confrontation with the Palestinians extends beyond the occupation of their land and the transformation of its demographic and territorial realities. It also encompasses systematic assaults on their humanity and dignity, aiming to erode the integrity of the Palestinian individual, an objective reflected in the aforementioned patterns of abuse. Concurrently, Israel continues its information war as well, reshaping facts and broadcasting them to the world through the lens of its own narrative, and on its own terms. Much of the Western world, particularly the United States, has consciously adopted this narrative and its accompanying terminology.

Israel characterises Israelis held in Gaza, whether civilian or military personnel, though most are military due to  universal conscription, as “hostages,” a designation intended to elicit humanising sympathy. By contrast, Israeli authorities officially classify Palestinians, whether civilians or combatants, as “detainees” or “security prisoners,” depriving them of the protections guaranteed under international law and diminishing the global empathy with their situation

It’s understandable that Israeli media and even domestic human rights organisations employ Israel’s official terminology, when addressing captivity, detention, and abduction in the recent conflict, and this is nothing new , but what is not understandable is the alignment of Western, particularly American, media with these classifications.

An examination of coverage in prominent American newspapers reveals a consistent adherence to Israeli terminology. The term “hostage” is reserved exclusively for Israelis held in Gaza. Conversely, referring to Palestinian fighters as “prisoners of war”, a term recognised under international humanitarian law, is effectively forbidden from the discourse. Even the legally precise term “arbitrary detention,” applicable to civilians held without due process, is seldom used. Instead, Palestinians are routinely described as detainees, prisoners, or even “terrorists,”reinforcing a narrative that strips them of legal protections and public sympathy, and reflecting a broader linguistic asymmetry that shapes public perception.

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The discrimination in US media coverage extended beyond terminology to both the scale and nature of reporting. Even the most liberal American outlets, those generally viewed as more sympathetic to Palestinians, dedicated two-thirds more coverage to Israelis held in Gaza than to Palestinian prisoners of war or civilians detained arbitrarily. In publications more explicitly aligned with Israeli perspectives, such as The New York Times, this gap rose to nearly 90 per cent.

Regarding the qualitative dimension of reporting, much of the US press adopted a highly individualised and humanised narrative when covering Israeli captives with intimate, personal stories designed to draw sympathy. Meanwhile, when addressing Palestinian prisoners of war or civilians detained arbitrarily, whether tortured or killed, coverage tended to be brief, impersonal, and collective, emphasising raw statistics and summary figures derived from UN or human rights reports rather than individual human experiences. The individuals themselves, and the human cost of their suffering, were largely absent from the narrative.

In sum, the conflict between Palestinians and Israelis continues unabated, and the contest over terminology is an integral component of its broader dynamics, impossible to ignore, and difficult to separate from the wider conflict. For Palestinians, political objectives shape terminology just as much as legal definitions do, and political imperatives have to influence the language used to describe their reality, alongside the legal classifications embedded in international humanitarian and human rights law. In this context, establishing clear and consistent terminology has become essential to navigating a fight for survival. Equally imperative is the systematic documentation and disclosure of the grave violations committed against Palestinian prisoners of war and civilians detained arbitrarily, or the Palestinians kidnapped and forcibly disappeared. Exposing the crimes committed against them is no longer optional, it is an obligation that is both national responsibility and ethical duty.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.

This work by Middle East Monitor is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.