Israel indefinitely delays Palestinian prisoner return after hostages ‘humiliated'
Israel was expected to free 620 Palestinians, including 50 serving life sentences, but they remained behind bars.
On Saturday, vehicles apparently carrying prisoners left the open gates of Ofer prison, only to turn around and go back in, hours after another cruel handover by the terror group.
Benjamin Netanyahu's office said: '[Because of] repeated violations, including the ceremonies that humiliate our hostages and the cynical exploitation of our hostages for propaganda purposes, it has been decided to delay the release of terrorists that was planned for yesterday until the release of the next hostages has been assured, and without the humiliating ceremonies. '
Ezzat El Rashq, a Hamas official, said the Israeli prime minister's statement was a 'deliberate attempt to disrupt the agreement, represents a clear violation of its terms, and shows the occupation's lack of reliability in implementing its obligations'.
Abdul Latif al-Qanou, another Hamas spokesman, told Al Araby, the Qatari TV channel, that there were 'positive signs' the prisoners would be released soon, and called on mediators to act 'immediately' to free them.
Qanou also said that Hamas will be ready to move to phase two of the ceasefire and release all hostages when 'the attack is completely stopped, Israel withdraws from the Gaza Strip in full and the reconstruction process begins'.
The Telegraph understands that negotiations over phase two have begun, but that Israel wants to expand the first phase and have more hostages released.
Saturday's hostage handover was met with fury in Israel, in part because Tal Shoham, Omer Shem Tov, Omer Wenkert and Eliya Cohen looked pale and emaciated.
Mr Shem Tov was seen waving, smiling and kissing the forehead of an armed Hamas member on a stage, a moment orchestrated and filmed by the terror group for its propaganda.
Mr Shem Tov's father later said: 'Omer said they told him what to do. You can see in the footage that someone came up to him and told him what to do.'
Abera Mengistu and Hisham al-Sayed, the other two hostages released on Saturday, had spent more than 10 years in captivity and were both suffering from mental illnesses.
Mr Sayed, an Israeli Bedouin, was the only hostage returned from Gaza in this round of the ceasefire who was not humiliated and put on a stage in front of a large crowd.
Mr Sayed's father, Sha'ban al-Sayed, said on Sunday that his son was not well.
He told Walla, the Israeli news site: 'He is broken and may have been held alone. It is strange for him to see people. He does not speak…'
Mr Sayed senior told Channel 12 news: 'He is not well. He was not in our world. A kind of Tarzan after living for 10 years with animals. He does not communicate.'
Hamas also brought two hostages, Eviatar David and Guy Gilboa-Dalal, to watch their fellow captives being freed in Gaza on Saturday, filming them inside a car where they were heard pleading to be released themselves.
Mr Gilboa-Dalal's father, Ilan Dalal, said on Sunday: 'They forced them to watch their friends being released and then returned them to the tunnels. There is no greater cruelty. They can't continue. It's simply inhumane.'
Donald Trump also slammed Hamas for the way it treated the Israeli hostages.
The US president said: 'We had the hostages given back today, it's disgraceful what's going on there. They're not in great shape, but we've also seen them in worse shape. What a terrible situation it is.'
The bodies of hostages Itzik Elgarat, Ohad Yahalomi, Tsahi Idan, and Shlomo Mantzur are expected to be returned next week in accordance with the ceasefire deal.
Meanwhile, Israel Katz, Israel's defence minister, said on Sunday that he has instructed the military to prepare to remain in some of the occupied West Bank's urban refugee camps 'for the coming year'.
The Israeli military said it was expanding the raid in the West Bank to other areas and was sending tanks to Jenin, a militant stronghold.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
STV News
15 minutes ago
- STV News
Swinney calls on UK Government to enable Gaza students to travel to Scotland
Scotland's First Minister has called for 'urgent action' from the UK Government to ensure students from Gaza can take up their places at Scottish universities. John Swinney said that other countries have successfully evacuated Gazan students to enable them to continue their studies. And he called on the UK Government to do 'everything in its power' to enable students to travel from Gaza to Scotland. The UK Government has said it is doing everything it can to find a solution. Mr Swinney spoke out after the Sunday Mail reported on a Palestinian student who has a place at Edinburgh University, but has not been able to leave Gaza to start her course next month due to visa processing issues. Mr Swinney said: 'I am appalled at the situation the students from Gaza are facing. We must see urgent action from the UK Government to support them in taking up their university places in Scotland. 'The people of Gaza are already suffering unimaginably at the hands of the Israeli government – the idea that these students could also be denied the chance to take up the university places in Scotland they have worked so hard to attain is not acceptable to me. 'I am aware that other countries including France, Ireland and Italy have managed to successfully evacuate students, so the UK Government cannot simply duck its responsibilities here. 'Where there is a political will, a resolution can be found – and failure to act is quite literally putting these people's lives at risk.' Scotland's Education Secretary Jenny Gilruth has written to the UK Home Secretary and UK Secretary of State for Education calling for action to support the students impacted and for urgent discussions. Mr Swinney said: 'I am clear that the international community must put a stop to Israel's killing in Gaza and that we must see the immediate recognition of a sovereign, independent Palestine. 'But until that point, the UK Government must do everything it can to ensure ordinary Gazans are not punished further. 'Scotland looks forward to welcoming students from Gaza seeking to take their places at our universities – the UK Government must do the right thing and do everything in its power to allow them to get here.' A UK Government spokesperson said: 'We are aware of these students and are actively considering how we can best support. 'Of course, the situation on the ground in Gaza makes this extremely challenging but we are doing everything we can to find a solution.' The normal arrangements for non-British nationals requiring a visa are to make an online visa application and submit their biometrics at a Visa Application Centre, prior to travel to the UK. The UK Government said biometrics are an essential part of the immigration process as they enable it to confirm the identity of the person and assess whether they pose a risk to public safety. Where an applicant cannot travel to a Visa Application Centre (VAC) to enrol their biometrics, they can contact the UK Government to explain their circumstances, so it can consider all the options. Get all the latest news from around the country Follow STV News Scan the QR code on your mobile device for all the latest news from around the country
The Guardian
2 hours ago
- The Guardian
Western journalists are failing to stand up for their colleagues in Gaza
For nearly two years, Israel has been systemically targeting and killing Palestinian journalists in Gaza. On Sunday night, the Israeli military brazenly killed another six journalists, who had been sheltering in a tent housing media workers in Gaza City. Among them was the 28-year-old Al Jazeera correspondent Anas al-Sharif and the rest of the network's team reporting from the besieged territory. Israel is able to kill Palestinian journalists with impunity not just because of the unconditional military and political support it receives from the US and other western powers, but also the failure of many western media organizations and journalists to stand up for their Palestinian colleagues. Western outlets are often willing to publicly criticize governments and campaign for journalists who are harassed or imprisoned by US adversaries like Russia, China or Iran. But these institutions are largely silent when it comes to Israel, a US ally. This shameful hypocrisy of western, and especially US, media has been laid bare by Israel's targeting of journalists since the 7 October 2023 Hamas attack. Journalists have the same protection as civilians under international law, which considers the targeted killing of journalists a war crime. The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) says that 192 journalists have been killed since 7 October – 184 of them Palestinians killed by Israel. Of the Palestinians killed, the CPJ found that at least 26 were deliberatively targeted for their work as journalists, but the group couldn't determine whether others were killed specifically for their work. Other organizations put the number of media workers killed in Gaza even higher, with a recent study by the Costs of War project at Brown University finding that at least 232 were killed as of late March. In one of its starkest conclusions, the report found that more journalists have been killed in Gaza than in the US civil war, both world wars, the Korean war, the Vietnam war, the wars in Yugoslavia and the US war in Afghanistan combined. You would think such shocking figures would galvanize news organizations and journalists around the world to condemn Israel's targeting of their Palestinian colleagues. But US news outlets have been largely quiet, compared, for example, with the crusade many of them supported to free the Wall Street Journal correspondent Evan Gershkovich after he was arrested and accused of espionage by Russia in March 2023. Major news organizations framed their reporting around the idea that Gershkovich had been wrongfully detained by Russia and convicted in a sham trial on fabricated charges. Yet these same news organizations are often unwilling to view Palestinian journalists as worthy of the same benefit of the doubt, and protection, against Israeli threats and smears. The Israeli military began threatening al-Sharif, the Al Jazeera correspondent killed on Sunday, in November 2023, when he reported receiving multiple calls from Israeli military officials telling him to stop his work and leave Gaza. A month later, al-Sharif's 90-year-old father was killed in an Israeli airstrike on the family's home. Israel then deployed its well-worn playbook, accusing al-Sharif of being a 'terrorist', as it has done with other Palestinian journalists that it later killed, without providing credible evidence. In October 2024, the Israeli military claimed that al-Sharif was among six Al Jazeera journalists, all reporting from Gaza at the time, who were current or former members of either Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad. Al Jazeera, along with press advocacy groups, viewed the accusations as a potential death sentence against the six journalists, one of whom was killed by Israel in March. The Israeli military's smear campaign against al-Sharif intensified last month, after his harrowing reporting on Israel's siege and starvation of Gaza went viral, including one broadcast where he cried on air as a woman walking behind him collapsed from hunger. (I recently spent six weeks in my home country, Lebanon, often watching Al Jazeera's coverage, and it was clear to me that al-Sharif had become the face of the Gaza war for millions of viewers in the Arab world.) In fact, the CPJ was so alarmed by the Israeli threats against al-Sharif that it issued a statement last month saying it was 'gravely worried' about his safety and urging his protection. But those pleas did not resonate in most US or other western newsrooms. There have been few media campaigns or statements of solidarity with Palestinian journalists – compared with similar efforts around Gershkovich and other western correspondents targeted by US adversaries. Major US news organizations have not published open letters in their newspapers calling attention to journalists who are being persecuted for doing their job, as the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post had done for Gershkovich in May 2024 to mark World Press Freedom Day. Press freedom and protection from persecution, it seems, are limited to western journalists. In 2022, Shireen Abu Akleh, one of Al Jazeera's most prominent correspondents and a Palestinian-American, was killed by an Israeli soldier while reporting in the West Bank. Yet Joe Biden's administration refused to hold Israel accountable for Abu Akleh's killing. Biden's impotence sharpened Israel's sense of impunity. Once Israeli leaders realized that they would face no consequences for killing one of the Arab world's most prominent journalists, who also happened to be a US citizen, is it surprising they would later conclude that they could get away with killing many more Palestinian journalists in Gaza? Western media outlets have made one consistent demand of Israel: to allow foreign reporters into Gaza, which the Israeli government has refused to do since October 2023, except for a few cases where journalists entered the territory while embedded with Israel troops. That's an admirable campaign for news organizations to take on, but it has also been framed in a problematic way. Some western outlets and journalists seem to think that only foreign reporters can provide full and impartial news coverage out of Gaza. A longtime BBC journalist, John Simpson, recently echoed this argument, writing on X: 'The world needs honest, unbiased eyewitness reporting to help people make up their minds about the major issues of our time. This has so far been impossible in Gaza.' That's hogwash, and it reinforces the worst colonial traditions of legacy media, which view western (often meaning white) journalists as the sole arbiters of truth. This debate reminds me of Evelyn Waugh's Scoop, in which the British novelist mercilessly skewered foreign correspondents and sensationalist journalism in the 1930s. Unfortunately, Waugh's satire still resonates today. One of the main problems with this conception of western journalists as the ultimate mediators of unbiased reporting is that it belittles the professionalism and courage of hundreds of Palestinian journalists, many of whom have given their lives covering Israel's assault on Gaza. The irony, of course, is that once foreign reporters are allowed into Gaza, most of them will rely heavily on Palestinian journalists, translators and other 'fixers' who often do the brunt of work for western correspondents. That's one secret of foreign coverage in much of the legacy western media: it's built on the unseen, and largely uncredited, work of local journalists and fixers. With no foreign reporters allowed into Gaza, Palestinian journalists like Anas al-Sharif have been able to tell their own people's story directly to the world. And Israel is methodically killing them for it, while many of their western colleagues and international journalistic institutions remain shamefully silent. Mohamad Bazzi is director of the Hagop Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies and a journalism professor at New York University. He is the former Middle East bureau chief at Newsday
The Guardian
3 hours ago
- The Guardian
Israeli media ‘completely ignored' Gaza starvation – is that finally changing?
Images of Palestinian children in Gaza, emaciated by hunger under the blockade imposed by Israel, and of families grieving the more than 61,000 people killed in the territory have stirred outrage among foreign governments and much of the global public. Inside Israel, however, the reaction has been markedly different. In a poll conducted in late July by the Israel Democracy Institute (IDI), more than three-quarters of Jewish Israelis – 79% – said they were either 'not very troubled' or 'not troubled at all' by reports of famine and suffering among Gaza's Palestinian population. According to Anat Saragusti, an expert on the media, the reason is simple: most people in Israel are unaware of those reports because for months they have never seen them. 'Until a couple of weeks ago, you could count only a handful of reports from Gaza not filtered by the IDF,' said Saragusti, the head of freedom of the press at the Union of Journalists in Israel. Except for a few newspapers such as the leftwing Haaretz, she said, 'all the other mainstream media completely ignored what's going on on the Palestinian side – the human casualties there, the numbers of children killed in this war. The Israeli audience simply did not see that at all.' In the past few weeks, the growing focus on the issue in the international media has led to some Israeli newspapers and TV channels reporting on hunger in Gaza for the first time, albeit as a debatable issue. Since the Hamas-led attacks of 7 October 2023, public debate in Israel has largely centred on national security, the plight of the Israeli hostages captured by Hamas, and the country's military goals in Gaza. In that climate, the humanitarian disaster caused by the Israeli assault on Gaza has tended to occupy a marginal place in the minds of many Jewish Israelis, who largely view the conflict as a legitimate act of self-defence in response to Hamas's attacks – although polls also show a clear majority want a deal with Hamas to end the war in exchange for the freedom of the remaining Israeli hostages. Media analysts say Israel's main broadcasters have largely embraced the narrative of a government described as the most far-right in the country's history. For months, the Israeli media have responded to international outrage by focusing on Israeli claims that the widespread hunger documented by numerous aid agencies is 'a Hamas-orchestrated starvation campaign' – summed up by Benjamin Netanyahu's claim last month: 'There is no policy of starvation in Gaza, and there is no starvation in Gaza.' According to UN World Food Programme, one-third of the Palestinian population in Gaza is going for days without eating, and half a million are on the brink of starvation. 'The worst-case scenario of famine is currently playing out in the Gaza Strip,' the UN-backed group the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) said last month, calling for an urgent ceasefire to alleviate 'widespread starvation'. According to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), another five people died last week due to malnutrition and starvation, bringing the total number of malnutrition-related deaths to 227, including 103 children, since October 2023. Even Donald Trump, Netanyahu's key international ally, when asked if he agreed with the Israeli PM on the issue, said: 'I don't know … those children look very hungry … that's real starvation stuff.' In a rare press conference with foreign journalists in Jerusalem last Sunday, Netanyahu displayed photographs of skeletal children in Gaza and dismissed them as fake, claiming they were part of a Hamas plot to attack Israel. He compared these images with a photograph of the Israeli hostage Evyatar David released by the Palestinian militant group early in August, pointing out that while the man held in Gaza appeared to be starving to death, the arm of a Hamas fighter visible in the frame looked strong and muscular. The implication was clear, according to the prime minister: the fighters of Hamas were eating well and keeping food from the Israeli hostages and from the public of Gaza. Saragusti said: 'Despite images of emaciated children published by major newspapers around the world, Israel pushed back. And Israeli media outlets adopted the narrative set out by the Israeli leadership, insisting that there is no starvation in Gaza.' As Etan Nechin, Haaretz's New York correspondent, wrote: 'After Netanyahu lost the election to Ehud Barak in 1999, reporters heard him say: 'When I return, I'll have my own media outlet.'' Today, two major media organisations are known for their backing of Netanyahu: Israel Hayom, the free daily owned by the family of the late Sheldon Adelson, the US Republican mega-donor; and Channel 14, a right-leaning broadcaster that went on air in 2014. 'They changed Israel's media landscape, and in the years that followed, a plethora of new hard-right outlets were established,' said Nechin. Although Israel appears to exist within its own bubble, shielded by a narrative that leaves no room for the suffering of people in Gaza, thousands of demonstrators who recently filled the streets of Tel Aviv are now urging the government to halt the atrocities against the Palestinians. 'I think it is horrendous what is happening in Gaza,' said Lenny Kadmon, 19. 'I think that the main reason not everyone here is against it is because most people find it too difficult or too scary to look at themselves and at what we do in Gaza.' Gal Alkalay, 28, said: 'I come here to protest in Tel Aviv every weekend. We ask our PM to end the war. Only in this way we can end the starvation in Gaza and the return of our hostages.' And yet, despite a growing number of Israeli intellectuals using the word 'genocide' to describe their government's actions in Gaza – as the award-winning author David Grossman did just a fortnight ago – analysts say they remain a small minority. In Jerusalem, where tensions between Arabs and Israelis are sharper, the majority of Jewish residents continue to align themselves with the narrative of Israel's political leadership. Asked what she thought of the suffering of Palestinian children in Gaza, Myriam Israel, 34, said: 'I think people should also see the suffering of our children terrorised by Hamas. But the world thinks only about children of Gaza. I think Hamas needs to think about their own children. And we need to think about the security of our country.' Zalman Coleman, 21, said: 'All you have to do is use your brain five seconds and you can see that Hamas's ultimate aim is to get that number [of deaths] as high as possible. And then from that, turn the whole world's face against Israel. [In this conflict] the media had so much potential to do so much good in the world. But they chose fake news.' Since the Hamas-led attacks of 2023, Israel has almost completely barred foreign journalists from entering Gaza – an unprecedented move in the history of modern conflict, marking one of the rare moments that reporters have been denied access to an active war zone. Reporters Without Borders and the Committee to Protect Journalists have formally called for Gaza to be opened to foreign media, warning that current measures severely undermine press freedom. Many argue that the Israeli ban is a deliberate tactic to restrict independent scrutiny, limit international visibility of the conflict, and thus control the narrative. 'The only way to enter Gaza and cover the war is to embed in Israeli army units,' said Saragusti – and even that is rarely allowed. 'There is no independent press in Gaza. There are only the Palestinian journalists, who many of them have been killed. Israel claims that there is no starvation but doesn't let the foreign press in to check by itself whether there is starvation or not.' Up to now, she added, 'the press blockade has succeeded very well in its goal'.
