COMMENTARY: By Eugene Doyle

Watching footage of Palestinian parliamentarian and hostage Khalida Jarrar emerge from Israeli captivity was jarring — a far, muffled cry from the sense of happiness and relief most of us felt seeing the young female Israeli soldiers released by Hamas around the same time.

What a study in contrast.

Khalida was clearly emaciated, traumatised and had turned, in the same period of time, from a powerful dynamic woman into a fragile, elderly human being who moved with difficulty.

• READ MORE: ‘Welcome to Hell, the Israeli prison system as a network of torture camps’
• The other hostages
• As Israel pounds Gaza, BBC journalists accuse broadcaster of bias
• Pacific Journalism Review special edition on bias: Gaza, genocide and media: Will journalism survive? — David Robie

What a difference it makes who holds you captive. It goes without saying I didn’t see this on any mainstream news outlet.

In a previous period of imprisonment — for being a member of the PFLP, a proscribed organisation — the Israelis wouldn’t even allow Khalida Jarrar to attend the funeral of her own daughter.

Instead she sent a message that was read at Suha’s funeral in 2021:

I am in so much pain, my child, only because I miss you.
I am in so much pain, my child, only because I miss you.

From the depths of my agony, I reached out and
embraced the sky of our homeland through the window
of my prison cell in Damon Prison, Haifa.
Worry not, my child.
I stand tall, and steadfast, despite the shackles and the jailer.
I am a mother in sorrow, from yearning to see you one last time.

Suha, my precious.

They have stripped me from bidding you a final goodbye kiss.
I bid you farewell with a flower.
Your absence is searingly painful, excruciatingly painful.
But I remain steadfast and strong,
Like the mountains of beloved Palestine.

No mainstream coverage
I searched online and found no mainstream outlet had covered Khalida’s release amid the flood of stories about the Israeli hostages. A search to see if Australian or New Zealand MPs had called for the release of their fellow legislator netted zero results.

To them, she is no doubt a non-person. Yet, Khalida Jarrar is a leading political activist and one of dozens of legislators imprisoned by the Israelis. She endured. She remained steadfast.

“The entire system of political imprisonment is based on suppressing Palestinian organising,” said Charlotte Kates, coordinator of Samidoun, the Palestinian Prisoner Support Network.

The four female Israeli “Offence” Force (IDF) soldiers, according to all the many images and reports, were fit, happy and well-fed after their 15 months in Hamas captivity.

In contrast Palestinian prisoners typically had lost 16kg by the time they were freed. The Israelis with all the food and resources in the world made a policy — an actual policy — of mistreating prisoners, reducing food to a minimum, often beating them, finding perverse ways to humiliate them and on many occasions sexually assaulting men, women, boys and girls who had been dragged into their custody without charge.

Many, an unknown number, died at their hands.

Israeli Minister of National Security, Itamar Ben-Gvir, called months ago for legislation to allow the execution of Palestinian prisoners “with a shot in the head” and said he would provide minimal food to them until the law was enacted. I couldn’t find a single Western leader who called for him to be arrested.

Israeli human rights report
These crimes are filling compendia being compiled by the United Nations, the ICC and multiple organisations worldwide. You can read some of it here in an Israeli human rights report, “Welcome to Hell, the Israeli prison system as a network of torture camps”.

Our media has a lot to answer for — for what was done to the thousands of Palestinian hostages because of its starring role in silencing Palestinian voices and hiding from view the realities of the Israeli prison system. Thousands were never charged with any crime — other than being Palestinian.

Entire congregations in mosques, groups of people in refugee centres, were indiscriminately swept up and tossed into Israeli concentration camps.

Were future historians to look back on these times and only have the mainstream media to go by, they would have lots of wonderful photos of the Israeli hostages, know them by name, see family hugs, biographical details, and listen to interviews with friends and relatives. In contrast, the Palestinians would turn towards History and we would see blank faces, erased of personality, all the detail of their stories rubbed out.

That’s why it is imperative to find better sources of news and information, like Middle East Eye, Palestine Chronicle, Electronic Intifada and Pearls & Irritations, that can enrich our understanding of our times and the experience of the victims of Western genocidal violence.

In his excellent article “The Other Hostages”, human rights lawyer Jonathan Kuttab says: “From the Palestinian perspective: there are about 13,000 Palestinian prisoners and detainees in Israeli jails who are just as worthy of our concern and also merit our sympathy, and whose families will rejoice at their long-awaited release.”

Turning a blind eye to Israeli mistreatment of prisoners — and the mainstream media bias in favour of all things Israeli — goes back decades. But let’s look at the months since October 7th.

No fact-checking
All the mainstream media and servile politicians raced to report without fact-checking the lies the Israelis and Americans, including President Biden, told about beheaded babies and mass rapes. Few had the decency to walk back the calumnies even after official retractions and international investigations disproved them.

In October 2023 I wrote one of my first stories post-October 7th on this very topic.

Within a month of October 7, eight BBC journalists wrote to Al Jazeera saying “the corporation is failing to humanise Palestinians . . .  investing greater effort in humanising Israeli victims compared with Palestinians, and omitting key historical context in coverage.”

CNN staff told British colleagues last year that their network’s pro-Israel slant amounts to “journalistic malpractice”.

Hats off to Novara Media, one of the larger alternative news and analysis platforms for its exposure of bias. What they found was that Palestinians are “killed” whereas Israelis are “massacred” or “slaughtered”.

Checking over 1000 articles by the UK’s supposedly progressive, left-leaning outlets — The Guardian, The Independent, Daily Mirror – Novara found that “all three publications favoured Israeli lives, narratives and voices.”

Taking a list of emotive words they cross-checked and found that 77 percent were about violence against Israelis and only 23 percent about Palestinians. Well over 95 percent of victims of violence are Palestinians, 100 percent of land thefts are by Israelis. Facts matter.

Journalism ‘used’ for racist war crimes
This is journalism being used in the service of racist war crimes, used to normalise the mistreatment of prisoners and other Palestinian untermenschen.

In the case of The Independent, it ran 70 stories on Israeli hostages (who at peak numbered about 250) and just one story on a Palestinian hostage (they number over 10,000).

British journalist Owen Jones deserves a medal for reports like: “BBC in Civil War over Gaza.” The report details the efforts of journalists within the organisation to deliver more balanced coverage but the extent to which those efforts are thwarted by powerful pro-Israel operatives within the corporation who ensure “systematic pro-Israel propaganda at the corporation.”

“This unprecedented slaughter could not have happened without powerful cheerleaders,” Jones said in a recent piece about media co-conspirators with Israel in the genocide. “Hold them to account.”

Damn right. I pray to whatever gods may be that justice will one day be served on all those who by their actions or by their “journalism” allowed these crimes to be committed.

I’ll give the last word to Khalida Jarrar as I wish her a full and speedy recovery:

“All I wanted was to bid my daughter a final farewell – with a kiss on her forehead and to tell her I love her as much as I love Palestine.”

Eugene Doyle is a writer based in Wellington. He has written extensively on the Middle East, as well as peace and security issues in the Asia Pacific region. He hosts the public policy platform solidarity.co.nz He is a lapsed Catholic who has maintained lifelong contact with some of the nuns who played an influential part in his upbringing.

RNZ News

As Israel presses ahead with strikes in Rafah and seizing the Rafah crossing from Egypt, aid agencies are sounding the alarm of a “catastrophic humanitarian situation”.

Rafah was “significant” because it was the only part in Gaza that had not been terribly damaged by the conflict, United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) senior deputy director Scott Anderson told RNZ Checkpoint.

“Most of the infrastructure is intact,” he said.

• READ MORE: Israel warned against creating a ‘humanitarian nightmare’ with Rafah attack
• Other War on Gaza reports

“And most importantly, we have 1.4 million of the 2.2 million people in Gaza sheltering here in Rafah. And of that number, more than half are children,” Anderson told Checkpoint.

“It’s the last place of safety within Gaza.”

He said people struggled daily to find food, water, showers and toilets.

Palestinians have now been ordered to evacuate parts of Rafah as Israel prepares for a long-threatened assault on Hamas holdouts in the city.

People displaced five times
Many of the people had already been displaced five or six times, Anderson said.

“And now come the evacuation orders and it makes people very nervous and apprehensive.

“For us it is a concern because Rafah is also where our main supply line for Gaza exists through Kerem Shalom from Israel, or through Rafah Gate from Egypt.”

He said it would affect aid reaching Rafah.

In the north of Gaza, only 30 to 50 trucks could enter a day, whereas Kerem Shalom in the south could accommodate up to 600 trucks.

The Rafah terminal from Egypt was a path for fuel and diesel to come in.

“If we don’t have diesel, we don’t have hospitals running, we don’t have food being delivered, water is not being produced, waste isn’t being picked up, and the sewers aren’t running.

“So those two crossings very much are the lifeline of Gaza, and without those, it could become very much a catastrophic humanitarian situation beyond what already exists.”

Palestinian militant group Hamas has agreed to a Gaza ceasefire proposal from mediators, but Israel said the terms did not meet its demands.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.