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Over the first four days of Israel-Hamas prisoner exchange, Israel arrests 133 Palestinians while releasing 150.
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But the worry for Palestinian prisoners does not end after their release. The majority of those freed are usually rearrested by Israeli forces in the days, weeks, months and years after their release.
Dozens of those who were arrested in a 2011 Israel-Hamas prisoner exchange were rearrested and had their sentences reinstated.
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Many of the women and children released during the truce have testified to the abuse they experienced in Israeli prisons.
Several videos have also emerged in recent weeks of Israeli soldiers beating, stepping on, abusing and humiliating detained Palestinians who have been blindfolded, cuffed and stripped either partially or entirely. Many social media users said the scenes brought back memories of the torture tactics used by United States forces in Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison in 2003.
I understand that people, especially children, are malleable into believing and doing horrible things, and it’s a fact that this will happen to many under Hamas or as a consequence of the ongoing conflict regardless of Hamas, but it’s also unfair to those hostages to assume that they’re already murderers. It’s a tragedy waiting to happen for multiple dimensions of reasons for many people involved in this entire conflict (wouldn’t you be radicalized if you saw your entire family covered in rubble or being treated like trash by other groups of people?), and it’s extremely unfortunate, but we can’t just instantly label them all as bad apples for something that may or may not happen to them, or that may or may not describe them currently. They’re still children, we can’t cast the dice on them, or we’re no different from those radicalized beyond common civil morality.