The Intercept website said that the government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and its supporters have promoted a narrative that the Palestinian prisoners it proposes to release under the truce are all hardened terrorists who have committed violent crimes. The truth is that more than two-thirds of these prisoners have not been convicted of any crimes, and most of them have been arrested while they were children.

The website explained - in a report written by Jeremy Scahill - that the Israeli government’s narrative regarding the release of prisoners is a deceptive and dishonest narrative, and it is accompanied by Interior Minister Itamar Ben Gvir preventing them and their families from celebrating their release, as he said, “My instructions are clear. There is no expression of joy. The expression “Joy is equivalent to supporting terrorism,” and he asked the Israeli police to use an “iron fist” to implement his decree.

Israel issued a list of the names of the alleged crimes committed by these prisoners, even though the vast majority of the 300 prisoners whom Israel proposes to release are teenage boys, 124 of whom are under 18 years of age, and even of those who are 18 years old, 146 of them reached the age of Prison, which means that these Palestinians were children when they were arrested by Israel, according to the definitions set forth in the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child.

The website indicated that 233 of the 300 names that Israel proposed to release have not been convicted of any crimes, and are simply classified as “under arrest,” but the Israeli narrative promotes that they are under fair judicial procedures, and will ultimately be tried fairly and impartially, noting that this is nothing but a farce - according to the site's words - because Palestinians are tried before military courts, often denied access to lawyers, detained in isolation for long periods, and subjected to other forms of violations.

Although Israel is the only country that routinely tries children in military courts - and its system has been repeatedly criticized and condemned by major international human rights organizations and institutions - it asks the world to believe that these prisoners are all dangerous terrorists.

The newspaper concluded that the Palestinians included in this list are all from the occupied West Bank, and lived their entire lives under the apartheid regime, and although some of them committed acts of violence, it is ridiculous and unfair to pretend that the context of this violence has no relation to the reality of their lives, especially with the impunity of violent Israeli settlers, even though they mercilessly target Palestinians in an attempt to expel them from their homes.

Source: Aljazeera.net