Israel Didn’t Free Hostages — It Deported Them. And the Media Said Nothing

Right, so there’s a certain audacity in calling it peace while the shells are still falling. Israel’s ceasefire is still being sold to the world as a turning point, but in Gaza, the only thing that turned was the camera, fixed on those hostage exchanges. Going unreported by comparison is the fact that the drones are still there, people are still being killed by Israel and many of the hostages Israel were releasing were being exiled instead of freed, all whilst Israeli ministers are already promising the next phase of destruction. Even Donald Trump flew in to deliver a sermon at the Knesset, congratulating Israel for a genocide it still hasn’t actually stopped fighting. The word ceasefire has rarely been so abused. What is being presented as closure is turning out to be a bureaucratic rebranding of genocide for Western audiences desperate to believe the nightmare was over. Gaza iss still burning; the only thing that that has ceased was what passed for Western scrutiny.
Right, so Israel called it a ceasefire. Western governments called it a breakthrough. But in Gaza, the genocide still hasn’t actually stopped. The guns slowed sure, but are still being used. The cameras moved on, but the killing has continued. The truce signed was marketed as the end of a two-year campaign, yet it hasn’t actually ended yet, still, supposedly 4 days into the ceasefire period now.
By the time Israel’s cabinet ratified the ceasefire deal, Gaza’s human toll had already surpassed sixty-six thousand dead, likely many more than that with so many people unaccounted for. More than twenty thousand were children. The UN’s humanitarian office confirmed that roughly four-fifths of all homes in Gaza had been damaged or destroyed. Every essential service—water, electricity, sanitation—had collapsed. These numbers were not disputed. They appeared in official UN situation reports and form the factual baseline for any discussion of what Israel now calls peace.
Despite the ceasefire having supposedly taken effect, some of the most recent attacks on Gaza by Israel include Israeli quadcopters firing on civilians in the Al-Shujaiya neighbourhood as people inspected the ruins of their homes. Three were killed. Israeli artillery hit parts of Jabalia and Al-Tarans. Tanks and small-arms fire echoed in Khan Yunis. Aid convoys waiting at Rafah were delayed because of what UN officials described as “security incidents.” The evidence of ongoing warfare seems obvious therefore.
The pattern is not new. Every Israeli ceasefire of the past decade has ended the same way—violence reduced to a slower rhythm, then resumes later on trumped up reasoning.
As I covered in a video just yesterday, Defence Minister Israel Katz has already stated publicly that “the great challenge ahead” was the destruction of Hamas’s tunnels and confirmed that he had already instructed the army to prepare. That order was issued as the ceasefire had barely begun. It was not a misstatement. It was policy.
Ceasefire on paper, genocide will continue in practice.
When a state begins a ceasefire by issuing new military orders, the truce is not a pause in violence—it is a re-arming period disguised as diplomacy.
If this is what Israel calls peace, what does war look like?
The moral arithmetic of the conflict has always been selective. Israel and its allies built their case around the 251 hostages taken by Hamas on 7 October 2023. Their stories filled broadcasts for months. When the last living captives were released just yesterday, the coverage was celebratory. But the other side of the equation—the Palestinians held by Israel—was treated as an administrative detail, not a humanitarian one.
Israel announced that around two thousand Palestinian detainees were freed under the agreement. The figure sounds generous until it’s placed beside the nine thousand who remain in Israeli custody. Of those, roughly three thousand are held under administrative detention—no charges, no trial, indefinite renewals. These are documented figures from prison-rights groups and Israel’s own public defender. Administrative detention is not an emergency measure; it is a governing tool inherited from the British Mandate and normalised through decades of occupation.
Over one million Palestinians have passed through Israeli prisons since 1967 when Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestine began. Every family has known imprisonment. The scale alone exposes the fiction that these are isolated “security” cases.
Testimonies from those newly released show what that system means in practice. Prisoners describe routine beatings, starvation diets, and denial of medical care. Some left custody weighing twenty or thirty kilograms less than when they entered. Others emerged unable to walk. Detainees reported months in solitary confinement, exposure to extreme cold, and being told through loudspeakers that their families had died in Gaza. Israel’s Public Defender’s Office has confirmed severe overcrowding and inhumane conditions across multiple facilities. The UN Committee Against Torture has cited Israel repeatedly for these violations.
The suffering inside Israel’s prisons is not collateral damage; it is part of the system’s design. The mass release serves public relations, not justice. Every freed body testifies to the cruelty of the machine that still holds thousands more. But that’s a story we never hear, we just hear about those 251 taken on October 7th 2023. Well they’re all free now, the same can’t be said of 9000 Palestinians. I bet they still won’t make the news though.
However, hidden inside Israel’s prisoner lists was the most revealing clause of the ceasefire. Among those supposedly released were at least one hundred and fifty-four Palestinians who were not allowed to return home at all. They were deported. Families were informed that their relatives would be sent to third countries—Egypt for the most part apparently, the one nation that built its defences in the Sinai up so massively to prevent Palestinian incursion and yet they are taking these exiles—and denied re-entry to Gaza or the West Bank.
Among them was Nael Barghouti, the longest-serving Palestinian hostage, held for forty-four years. Others included detainees from the 1980s and 1990s who had become symbols of endurance. Under Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention, the forcible transfer or deportation of protected persons from occupied territory is illegal “regardless of motive.” Yet Israel reframed expulsion as a “security condition” and has got away with it. International law set aside for Israel’s whims once again.
Exile is demographic strategy masquerading as compromise. By removing political veterans and community leaders, Israel achieved a quiet cleansing anyway—leadership stripped without gunfire, displacement disguised as release.
A release that exiles is not freedom; it is deportation by another name.
Even within its own declared framework, Israel reneged on the deal by doing this. Several prominent detainees expected to be freed were kept in custody. Nael Barghouti’s case was reclassified for “security reasons.” Dr Hussam Abu Safiya, the paediatrician seized during an army raid on Kamal Adwan Hospital has been excluded entirely. International medical organisations appealed for his release; none succeeded. At least sixty health workers remain imprisoned.
These omissions were deliberate. Israel freed those whose release served optics and kept those whose freedom would symbolise defiance.
While Gaza buried its dead, Donald Trump stood in the Knesset and declared victory. Just yesterday he told Israeli lawmakers that “the Gaza war has now ended” and that Israel “has won all that it can by force of arms.” The chamber applauded. Yet two parliamentarians—Ayman Odeh and Ofer Cassif—shouted “genocide” and were removed by security. These were elected officials. This is the voice of their constituents being denied. Israeli democracy is a farce.
International reaction came swiftly. Commentators across multiple networks called the speech grotesque, accusing Trump of celebrating mass death. None of his remarks mentioned Gaza’s civilian toll or the starvation crisis. Instead, he praised Israel’s resilience and urged a pardon for Netanyahu over his corruption case. The performance reframed destruction as achievement and immunity as justice.
This was the moment the illusion of peace collapsed.
The Knesset speech was not diplomacy—it was absolution. A foreign president granted moral immunity to an ally still killing under a truce.
Since the ceasefire announcement, Israeli operations have continued daily. The strikes in Al-Shujaiya, Jabalia, and Khan Yunis are just the latest visible breaches but they won’t be the last. UN agencies report persistent “security incidents” delaying aid deliveries. Israeli officials call them defensive actions. That phrasing converts aggression into maintenance. Each incident is treated as an exception until exceptions end up defining the rule.
When killing civilians no longer breaks a ceasefire, the ceasefire has no meaning. It becomes a management phase between bombardments—war slowed to preserve optics.
Peace as public relations.
Mass detention is not an emergency tactic; it is the spine of the occupation. The first ever prisoner swap took place all the way back in 1968—three Israeli soldiers for thirty-seven Palestinians—and every decade since has repeated the cycle. The statistics are consistent: about one million Palestinians arrested since 1967; more than a hundred thousand administrative detention orders issued; nine thousand still behind bars today. Most are held inside Israel rather than in occupied territory, a direct violation of international humanitarian law in and of itself.
Generations have grown up with imprisonment as a certainty of life. Families learn to navigate permits and prison visits like bureaucratic rites of passage. The state’s control over movement and custody is total.
Israel’s carceral system is not about preventing violence; it is about governing a population through fear and absence. Every arrest re-asserts ownership of the occupied body.
Benjamin Netanyahu’s survival depends on permanent crisis. His coalition partners—Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich—insist that any pause before “the total destruction of Hamas” would bring down the government, they would ensure that. Netanyahu himself remains under criminal indictment; wartime unity keeps his trials dormant. Peace would end that shield. For him, conflict is the condition of power.
Israel Katz’s directive to prepare for new operations proves that the military never demobilised and there’s no intention of that. The ongoing blockade of Gaza breaches the humanitarian clauses of the truce but continues unchecked. The mediators—Qatar, Egypt, the United States—have issued no rebuke at all.
The Knesset spectacle and US endorsement turned the truce into a diplomatic cover. American military aid continues at roughly four billion dollars annually. None of it has been suspended. Washington frames this support as “shared democratic values,” a phrase that replaces oversight with sentiment. The International Criminal Court has opened investigations into Gaza but has issued no further indictments since the issuance of arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant. The International Court of Justice ordered Israel to prevent genocidal acts and ensure aid access, but the order remains unenforced. The blockade persists, aid trickles, and the courts deliberate.
Sixty-six thousand dead, twenty thousand children, one hundred and fifty thousand wounded. Every figure represents a life reduced to data. Hospitals operate on generator fuel, performing amputations without anaesthetic as still no medical aid has entered. In Rafah and Deir al-Balah, survivors live in ruins classified by Israel as “neutralised areas.” Electricity and clean water remain intermittent. The so-called ceasefire has changed none of that.
Released prisoners describe identical methods of humiliation across facilities: beatings, forced standing, mock executions, denial of medical care. The phrase “slaughterhouse” recurs in separate testimonies from different prisons. That consistency indicates system, not accident.
Israel’s governance of Palestinians—whether through siege or detention—follows the same logic: control life just enough to avoid the word death, then call it security.
Western media narratives sustain the illusion of progress. The framing is uniform: Israel “responds” while Hamas “violates.” Released Palestinians are “security detainees.” Bombings become “operations.” These linguistic shifts are deliberate; they translate occupation and genocide into bureaucracy. By contrast, regional outlets continue to document shelling and mass displacement, but even their existence gets denied by some in politics and the press. The disparity reveals not different facts but different permissions. When states supply the weapons, their press supplies the grammar.
The continuity from colonial emergency law to modern Israeli detention is direct. The same regulations the British used prior to 1948 still underpin Israel’s legal authority to detain without trial. The occupation’s endurance relies on this continuity: the prison replaces the camp, the permit replaces the passbook. The individual case becomes the system’s legitimacy.
The occupation has evolved from territorial control to carceral management. Imprisonment is not a by-product; it is the mechanism that sustains the illusion of order.
This latest ceasefire has turned legal vocabulary into theatre. “Self-defence” now justifies collective punishment; “proportionality” measures destruction by Western patience rather than law. The acts documented in Gaza—mass killing, starvation, displacement, deportation—fit the UN’s definition of genocide. Yet governments refuse to use the term. The semantics of denial have replaced moral clarity, but then for many morality no longer has anything to do with that, more their own complicity does.
When the world calls this a ceasefire, it teaches that war crimes can be paused for applause. Each violation unpunished becomes precedent. International humanitarian law, once conceived as universal restraint, now functions as selective permission.
Behind every statistic is a visible survivor. In Gaza’s camps, families sift through rubble where homes once stood. In Israel’s prisons, nine thousand people remain either without trial or found guilty under another states laws. Freed detainees return to demolished neighbourhoods or get exiled abroad. The separation between prison and enclave has dissolved. Both are zones of control where Israel regulates existence by its decree. And the word applauds.
None of this would be sustainable without external partnership. The United States, the United Kingdom, and Europe continue to fund, arm, and defend Israel diplomatically. Statements of “concern” replace action. Arms contracts proceed. Trade flows. The international order built to prevent atrocities now subsidises them.
Complicity has replaced neutrality. Western governments are no longer observers of Israel’s actions; they are its co-authors.
When words lose their meaning, accountability becomes impossible. “Ceasefire” now describes ongoing attacks. “Release” means exile. “Humanitarian corridor” means checkpoint. The international system no longer prevents genocide—it manages its paperwork. The language of peace has been weaponised to disguise annihilation.
For more on Israel’s declared intention to go back in to collapse the Hamas tunnels, many of which have been proven over the course of the last two years to not exist to justify attacking certain targets, hospitals spring to mind for me on this as I’m sure they do for you, check out this declared announcement by Defence Minister Israel Katz in this video recommendation here as your suggested next watch.
Please do also hit like, share and subscribe if you haven’t done so already so as to ensure you don’t miss out on all new daily content as well as spreading the word and helping to support the channel at the same time which is very much appreciated, holding power to account for ordinary working class people and I will hopefully catch you on the next vid. Cheers folks.