“Israel has done something truly incredible—Israel has managed to turn Jews into Nazis!” —Bob Avakian, November 10, 2023

Trump’s Gaza “peace” plan opened a window into yet more Israeli atrocities: kidnapping and holding thousands of Palestinian hostages who were viciously tortured. 

Trump’s plan called for Israel to release “250 life sentence prisoners plus 1,700 Gazans who were detained after 7 October 2023, including all women and children detained in that context. For every Israeli hostage whose remains are released, Israel will release the remains of 15 deceased Gazans.”

Israel’s Palestinian Hostages

Who are these 1,700 Gazans? Most are Palestinian civilians seized in Gaza and taken to Israel, to be used as bargaining chips. Some were designated "illegal combatants," but most were never tried or even charged.¹

In other words, most, if not all, can rightly be considered hostages! Yet for all the talk of Israeli hostages who were being held by Hamas, U.S. politicians and the media rarely if ever talked about these Palestinian hostages. To be clear, the holding of civilian hostages by Hamas was an unjust war crime. But the scale of Israel's hostage system dwarfs what Hamas could even dream of.

When these hundreds of Palestinian hostages were released, many showed signs of starvation, medical neglect and torture, some emerging drastically underweight, with permanent injuries, or visible signs of beatings.

One detainee told Al Jazeera that “they were tortured ‘more than once a day,’ electrocuted, and shot with rubber-coated bullets. One described their detention as being held in ‘a slaughterhouse.’” Another described 100 days of being handcuffed, blindfolded, and beaten. 

Many came back to more tragedy and nightmare. Haitham Salem was arrested in November 2024. When he was released as part of the ceasefire agreement, he fell to the ground, clutching his stomach in pain, rocking back and forth, his legs shaking. Why? He had just learned that his daughters, aged two and five, his son, aged eight, and his wife had all been killed in Israeli attacks weeks earlier. 

The release of these hostages was a joyous day for many Palestinians, and rightly so. But while Israelis were encouraged to celebrate, Palestinians in the West Bank were threatened with tear gas and arrests if they celebrated. 

Evidence of Brutal Deaths and Desecration of Palestinian Remains

In addition to living hostages, both sides pledge to return the remains of dead hostages. But while Hamas is having to find bodies of hostages buried in rubble—along with the remains of thousands of other slaughtered Palestinians—Israel has been holding Palestinian corpses, again as bargaining chips. Defense for Children International–Palestine reported in September that Israel was holding over 750 corpses, 45 of which were the bodies of children. These are being held in morgues or in unmarked graves.

This too has revealed Israel’s Nazi-like brutality, dehumanization, and murder of Palestinians, which has long been deliberately shrouded in silence by Israel and the U.S. imperialists.

First, many of the bodies are being returned with no identification whatsoever. Officials at Nasser Hospital “said they received no information about who they were or how Israel had them,” the New York Times reports. The bodies “were labeled only with numbers assigned by Israel but no names.”

This has cruelly forced families to search through photos, desperately trying to find out if the remains of their loved ones are among those Israel has returned.

Even more barbarically, according to Al Jazeera, many bodies had signs of torture, gunshot wounds and their hands and legs cuffed. Some even still had blindfolds on, indicating they’d been summarily executed. Others had tank tracks across their bodies.²

The Director General of Gaza’s Health Ministry described bodies being "bound like animals, blindfolded” and that they “bore horrific signs of torture and burns that reveal the extent of the crimes committed in secret.”

Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor reports examining remains which "bore clear marks of hanging, rope imprints around their necks, injuries from close-range gunfire, bound hands and feet with plastic restraints, and blindfolds."

Israel may have even harvested organs from some Palestinians. An official in Gaza’s Media Office states, "When we examined the bodies, we found that large parts were missing. There were half bodies, bodies without heads, without limbs, without eyes, and without internal organs." 

Israel’s Prison System: “Third Front” of Genocide

All this is just the tip of the iceberg of Israel’s barbaric and long-standing prison system.

Since 1967, an estimated one million Palestinians have been arrested and locked up by Israel, according to New York University professor Andrew Ross, who calls Israel’s prisons the “third front” of its war against Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. 

Since October 7, 2023, more than 19,000 Palestinians have been detained in the Palestinian West Bank and Jerusalem, and today, over 11,000 Palestinians remain locked up in Israeli prisons. Nearly one third are imprisoned without charges or trial, under “administrative detention.” This includes 400 children!

Human rights organizations report that Palestinian prisoners are “subject to beatings, torture, rape and extreme deprivation. Men and women spoke about loud music played for hours on end, attacks by dogs, waterboarding, suspension from ceilings and severe sexual and gender-based violence.”

“Food was reduced to a survival diet, we had no hot water, yard time or hygiene items, no contact with the outside world, and were crammed into three-by-four-meter cells that used to hold half as many,” one prisoner told Andrew Ross. “I have been to prison before, and this was no longer a prison; it was Dante’s Inferno.”

Over the past two years, more than 77 prisoners have died in custody. Few of their bodies were ever returned to their families.³

Despite widespread demands they be released, Israel continues to imprison prominent Palestinian figures, including Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya, the director of Kamal Adwan Hospital in Beit Lahia, and the widely known and respected political leader Marwan Barghouti, who was recently viciously beaten by Israeli prison guards.⁴