Well let’s use our brains, shall we.

CNN quotes the Palestinian Commission for Detainees and the Palestinian Prisoner’s Society. Let’s go looking into their reports. Last Palestinian Prisoner’s Day (April, 17), the PPS reported at least 4,900 confirmed detainees with over 1,000 “administrative detainees”, which is Israeli code for “we detained them because they’re Arabs”.

However, by that same date, Al Jazeera reported that in just 4 months of 2023 there had already been 2,300 new arrests, with new arrests happening daily.

Now, later this year the Palestinian Authority reported that there’s been almost 5,000 new detainees, almost all administrative, since October 7th alone.

The number of prisoners has now risen to more than 10,000 people, Palestinian officials said on Thursday afternoon.

Well, this numbers do seem all over the place and seem to not add up. Why don’t we try to find another source, let’s say a Jewish source. There’s this B’Tselem people, what do they say:

At the end of 2020, the IPS adopted a new policy and stopped providing B’Tselem with the requested figures. Instead, it has since published some data on the IPS website every three months. […] at times, some Palestinians are briefly held in military facilities. The figures from the military are received with a significant time delay and offer no details regarding inmates’ legal standing. The following figures were provided or published by the military and the IPS, so responsibility for their accuracy lies with them.

Well, how about the detention conditions. I’m sure it’s not that bad. Let’s look at Amnesty International first:

Amnesty International has for decades documented widespread torture by Israeli authorities in places of detention across the West Bank. However, over the past four weeks, videos and images have been shared widely online showing gruesome scenes of Israeli soldiers beating and humiliating Palestinians while detaining them blind-folded, stripped, with their hands tied, in a particularly chilling public display of torture and humiliation of Palestinian detainees.

“One of the Israeli officers who came, approached me and kicked me on my left side, then jumped on my head with his two legs pushing my face further into the dirt and then continued kicking me as I was head down, into the dirt, with my hands tied behind my back. He then got a knife and tore all of my clothes off except for my underwear and used part of my torn clothes to blindfold me. The beating to the rest of my body did not stop, at one point he started jumping on my back – three or four times – while yelling ‘die, die you trash’ … in the end before this finally stopped, another officer urinated on my face and body while also yelling at us ‘to die’.”

Oh, bother. I guess you’re right, I was talking out of my ass. Things are actually way worse than I made them out to be.

If they’re the result of an illegal, internationally condemned occupation, lack conviction and are ethnically motivated to politically subjugate a group of people. They are hostages.