from thefreeonline on 24th Nov 2023 By Ben Bartee at Global Research Report updated today
‘Three of the over 20 Americans could be part of the first group of hostages released: two adults and a 3-year-old girl named Abigail, a senior Biden administration official said’.
Families of the 3 US hostages who may be released
However Israeli officials tried to exclude release of captives from other nationalities “Israel will not exchange Palestinian prisoners in exchange for non-Israeli hostages, a senior Israeli official who gave NBC News details on an agreement with Hamas..” NBC News: 2 of the US captives, Judith and Natalie Raanan, have already been released.
“Over 10,000 Palestinian political prisoners are now being held in Israeli prisons. Most of them are imprisoned without or awaiting trial, or in “administrative detention”. In effect they too are ‘hostages’.
US media have been censoring the identities and even the exact number of the US citizens imprisoned. Israeli society is more open with a huge protest movement demanding freedom for the hostages and an end to Israeli carpet and bunker busting bombing of Gaza, which Hamas officials say has killed at least 50 of the captives, along with up to 14,000 Gazans + thousands still under the rubble”.
‘Relief’ in war-torn Gaza as truce takes effect in Israel-Hamas war
Aid begins to trickle in to Gaza as the first pause begins after seven weeks of hostilities between Israel and Hamas.… By Al Jazeera Staff….
A Qatar-mediated four-day truce has taken effect in Israel’s war on Gaza. The first pause after seven weeks of bombardment has been met with relief by Palestinians.
“The landmark deal that will also involve a four-day pause in fighting, the delivery of hundreds of aid trucks, and the release of 150 Palestinian women and children* held in Israeli jails.”
*Note that when Israeli civilians are held in Gaza, they were “kidnapped” and are termed “hostages,” but when Israeli jails Palestinian women and children with no charges or judicial process of any kind, they do not receive the benefit of the same designation in Western corporate state media. That’s how subtle propaganda can get, and it’s easy to miss it if you’re not attuned to the pettiness with which these organizations play semantical games.
It appears Israel is not making any effort to get non-Israeli hostages released — only Israeli and some US citizens
Biden Will Not Escape History’s Judgement for Failure to Stop Gaza Assault. Ralph Nader
Israel’s strategic play here is obvious to anyone not blinded by its powerful propaganda network that extends, unfortunately, deep into American corporate state media.
In the immediate term, the continued captivity of all nationalities by Hamas serves Israel’s interests more than their release would.
It serves as a valuable propaganda tool to gin up anger and provides an ongoing pretext to do whatever Israel likes in Gaza with impunity under the guise of pursuing the release of hostages.
One of 1000’s of children killed by US backed Israeli revenge bombing
All international criticism is deflected with the call on Hamas to “release the hostages.” Were they released, justifying the Israeli government’s activities there (carpet-bombing) would become much more diplomatically tenuous.
(Of course, it’s unclear exactly how carpet-bombing Gaza could ever achieve the stated objective of returning the Israeli hostages unless they intend them to come back as corpses with limbs blown apart. Nonetheless, the Israeli propagandists have been beavering away trying to square that circle for many weeks now.)
Furthermore, the continued captivity of American hostages, in particular, would serve to maintain (nearly unconditional) American government support for its Gaza campaign — a weighty, some might say Herculean, diplomatic feat, given that virtually the entire rest of the world has condemned Israel for what it’s done. And that Herculean effort is costing the U.S. government big time in terms of its global cache.
At this moment, the United States is Israel’s only geopolitical ally left that’s fully on board with the program.
Another reason Israel would like to draw out the military operation in Gaza as long as possible using whatever pretext it can is that it’s stalling for time to figure out what to do with all of the Gazans it would like to displace.
A leaked “concept paper” from the Intelligence Ministry proposed expelling the Gazans into the Sinai Peninsula to live in tent cities, which did not go over well diplomatically, to say the least. More recently, it’s been pressuring America and Western Europe to take the Gazans off of their hands. So it needs some wriggle room to devise alternative solutions.
However, at the same time, the state is under immense, unprecedented internal pressure to be seen to be doing something concrete to secure the Israeli hostages aside from posturing in the media.
Netanyahu and his allies were already in existential political trouble before October 7th, and the threats to his and his ideologically expansionist base’s grip on power have only multiplied following the government’s clear de-prioritization of hostage release below annihilating Gaza, not to mention the “intelligence failure” of that day itself.
It turns out that waging war can be just as difficult politically on the international stage as it can on the domestic front, even in a country as usually united in its militarism as Israel.
So the Israeli state has been walking a political tightrope between maintaining its justification for its assault on Gaza while doing its best to appease the growing dissident faction within the state itself.
This is why, I speculate, Israel is only doing a deal for 50 of its hostages; it buys them some political cover at home while maintaining the existence of many more hostages in Gaza and thus the theoretical justification for what it’s doing there, in addition to “eliminating Hamas” (a pipe dream impossible to achieve because Hamas is scattered across borders and because its bombing campaign is only generating more, and more hardened, recruits.
Thus the war must go on. And on. And on.
(Note: In the original version of this article, I stated that Israel jails Palestinian women and children on “no charges,” when, in fact, it jails Palestinian women on intentionally vague charges like “having contacts with hostile organisations” and then holds them and the babies they have while incarcerated indefinitely in pre-trial detention with no due process. I apologize for the error.)
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This article was originally published on the author’s Substack, Armageddon Prose.
Ben Bartee, author of Broken English Teacher: Notes From Exile, is an independent Bangkok-based American journalist with opposable thumbs. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.
Featured image: Bad Moon Rising – by Mr. Fish
The original source of this article is Global Research
Copyright © Ben Bartee, Global Research, 2023
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