Who speaks for Palestinian POWs?

Amira Howeidy , Friday 24 Jan 2025

Why are Palestinian prisoners of war in Israeli captivity so fundamental to the Palestinian liberation project? Leading Palestinian lawyer Raji Sourani speaks to Al-Ahram Weekly

Who speaks for Palestinian POWs?

 

From the International Court of Justice (ICJ) to every international rights group that matters, the consensus is that Israel has committed genocide in Gaza during the 15 months since October 2023.

The official death toll hovers at approximately 47,000 Palestinians killed and at least 11,000 wounded. The latter includes the largest cohort of child amputees in modern history.

Since the ceasefire deal between Israel and Hamas came into force on 19 January, more and more corpses continue to be uncovered from beneath the mountains of rubble in Gaza, raising the death toll by the minute.

The three-phase agreement includes the gradual release of the Israeli hostages held by Hamas in exchange for a yet to be finalised number of Palestinian captives, the realisation of a ceasefire, and the gradual withdrawal of the Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) from yet to be finalised parts of Gaza.

The agreement went into force on 19 January. At 4:00pm, Hamas’ Al-Qassam Brigades delivered three Israeli women taken prisoner on 7 October 2023 along with 250 others from the Al-Aqsa Flood cross-border operation. Hours after midnight, the Israeli authorities released 69 female Palestinian prisoners out of a list of 90, with 18 women yet to be set free, according to the Commission of Palestinian Detainees Affairs.

The nihilistic destruction of the tiny Mediterranean enclave, driving it back virtually to the stone age as a result of the bombing of some 90 per cent of Gaza’s civilian infrastructure, has crushed any hope of a resumption of normal activity for years to come.

It is a devasting price to pay for a prisoner-exchange deal, some say, that could only see the release of fewer than 2,000 Palestinians held by Israel while crushing an entire nation and its future in Gaza. The equation certainly does not add up to the current outcome: the worst genocide in modern history for a few hundred Palestinian prisoners.

For Raji Sourani, one of Palestine’s leading human rights lawyers and director of the Gaza-based Palestinian Human Rights Centre, the entire premise of this approach is a grotesquely dishonest representation of the genocide committed by Israel.

Things are not that simple, he cautioned. “This is not about mathematics. It’s about chemistry,” Sourani told Al-Ahram Weekly in an interview on Monday.

Sourani, 71, left Gaza in the early months of the war, moving between several European cities before recently settling in Cairo. During that time, he worked with South Africa’s legal team that successfully argued for Israel’s violation of the Genocide Convention before the International Court of Justice.

The world court, the principal judicial organ of United Nations, found merit in South Africa’s case, declaring back in January 2024 that it would hear the case, which is expected to take years. In November 2024, the International Criminal Court (ICC) also issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former minister of defence Yoav Gallanat on charges of committing war crimes in Gaza.

In the entirety of the Israeli war, which proceeded to decimate Gaza under the pretext of forcing the return of the Israeli hostages, there has been no mention of the Palestinians that Israel has detained since October 2023, Sourani said, citing some staggering numbers.

“Nobody is talking about the 18,000 to 20,000 Palestinians from Gaza who have been largely forcibly disappeared by Israel since 7 October 2023. For 15 months now, we haven’t known if they’re dead or alive or their locations.”

In June 2024, Israeli Minister of National Security Itamar Ben Gvir called for a bill to enable the mass execution of Palestinian prisoners held by Israel.

“Hardly any attention is given to the horrific conditions experienced by Palestinian prisoners: their torture, starvation, amputations, and absence of any healthcare by prison authorities; or, for that matter, when 11 Israeli soldiers gang raped Palestinian detainees. Instead, these rapists are celebrated on Israeli TV. It is normalised and accepted,” Sourani said.

Why is Israel alone entitled to be outraged at the holding of hostages, he asked. Why are Palestinians not allowed to do anything for the thousands of prisoners held captive by Israel?

“Palestinians are not subhuman. Our POWs are at the forefront of the Palestinian struggle. They are the crème de la crème of our people, for their sacrifices and their legitimate struggle for the self-determination and independence of our people,” Sourani said.

They are also not just “prisoners,” as many of them are also leaders, such as Fatah leader Marwan Al-Barghouti, Socialist leader Ahmed Saadat, and Hamas military commander Abdallah Al-Barghouti, among others.

“They are part of our political and historic leadership. Thousands of them are languishing in Israeli prisons, and many have been detained again after they are released. It never ends.”

Why was Khalida Jarrar arrested, Sourani asked, in reference to the prominent socialist Palestinian politician and former MP who was detained after the 7 October attack and held without charge in solitary confinement for 15 months before she was released this week in the first phase of the prisoner-exchange deal.

A report on the pattern of administrative detention from 2001 to 2024 by the Israeli B’tsleem rights group shows a sharp and unprecedented surge since 2021 in the number of Palestinians arrested by the Israeli authorities over the past three years and since the current extreme right government came to power in 2022.

Before 7 October 2023, Israel had arrested 3,307 Palestinians. The primary objective of the Hamas operation that abducted 251 Israelis on 7 October was to trade them with these Palestinian detainees in a prisoner-exchange deal, the group said.

Prisoner-exchange deals have been a constant feature of Israeli politics since it was recognised as a state by the UN in 1948 on parts of Palestine. According to a study by the Ramallah-based Palestinian Ministry of Detainees and Ex-Detainees Affairs, Israel has traded POWs with Palestinians and several Arab states including Egypt, Syria, and Lebanon in at least 38 prisoner-exchange deals, including trading the bodies of dead detainees, since 1948.

One of the biggest such deals between Israel and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine movement in 1985 saw 1,155 Palestinian and Lebanese prisoners exchanged for three Israeli soldiers. In 2011, Israel released 1,018 Palestinian prisoners, including Yahya Al-Sinwar, the mastermind of the 7 October attack, in exchange for the Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit.

Sourani’s Palestinian Centre for Human Rights is expected to publish a report in March on the enforced disappearance of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza during the war. The findings, he said, are “shocking to the bones.”

They are separate from the 11,000 Palestinians from both Gaza and the West Bank who have been detained by Israel since 7 October and are currently held in Israeli prisons.

Starting on 7 October 2023, a staggering number of Palestinians have disappeared. They include 1,500 to 1,600 militants who crossed the border into Israel and were not killed by the IOF during Operation Al-Aqsa Flood.

Additionally, Sourani said, there were 15,000 Palestinian labourers from Gaza, all of them with work permits, who were in Israel on 7 October and were arrested. Only a few returned home, and some were detained and then released. But the total number of workers still held by Israel remains unknown, although they are estimated to be around 4,000 to 5,000.

Separately, a large number of ordinary Gazans, probably numbering in the hundreds, crossed the border in the chaos of 7-8 October 2023.

When IOF troops began their ground operation in Gaza on 28 October 2023, wreaking havoc over the months that followed in Beit Hanon, Beit Lahya, Central Gaza, Khan Younis and Rafah, thousands of Palestinians were detained en masse, said Sourani.

“Some were executed, and others were detained. Then there are those we know nothing about, and they number in the thousands.”

Another group of Palestinians who were forcibly displaced to other areas in Gaza at gunpoint and had to cross Israeli military checkpoints also disappeared. Such events continued until recently in northern Gaza.

“In total, we are talking about 18,000 to 20,000 enforced disappearances,” said Sourani. An Israeli law, passed in 2011, considers them “unlawful combatants,” he said. The law grants the Israeli military sweeping powers to detain anyone from Gaza indefinitely without having to produce evidence to substantiate claims against them.

“Anywhere in the world, the existence of forcible disappearance translates to something horrifying. And yet this is something I haven’t come across in Gaza before during my 40-year career. But now we are indeed in a situation where there are thousands upon thousands of forcibly disappeared Palestinians from Gaza alone.”

In its unrelenting pursuit of national independence from the Israeli settler-colonial project, there was never a time when the Palestinian struggle was not invested in liberating POWs.

Despite UN Resolutions, and more recently the finding of the ICJ demanding that Israel ends its “illegal occupation” of Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem, Israel denies it has been occupying any Palestinian territory since 1967.

Palestinians refer to their prisoners as “asra,” or POWs held captive by the Israeli Occupation.

“Securing the release of our POWs is not a Hamas invention, nor did it start on 7 October. Our history dates back to operations in the 1960s of hijacking planes just to liberate our hostages. It is at the very core and essence of the Palestinian struggle,” Sourani said.

But securing the release of the prisoners is not an end in itself. For over a decade, Hamas and other Palestinian factions have been pushing for the release of heavyweight political leaders such as Al-Barghouti and Saadat, whose return to political life could dramatically change the entire Palestinian landscape.

Al-Barghouti, 64, is serving multiple life sentences and is considered by opinion polls to be the most popular Palestinian leader alive today.

Hamas insists on his release in the coming prisoner-exchange phases. That possibility would have a huge impact on the future of the Palestinians at an historic juncture, observers say, because he is supported by both Islamist and secularist forces.

“The entire political landscape would change with this event,” Sourani said.

“If someone like Al-Barghouti were out of prison, the crippling and awful Palestinian division between Gaza’s Hamas and the West Bank’s Palestinian Authority would end in 24 hours. That’s how important the pressing issue of Palestinian POWs is.”

* A version of this article appears in print in the 23 January, 2025 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly

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