What’s it like being a Palestinian in Israeli prison or an Israeli held by Hamas? With Jon Elmer

the uh military analysis portion of our live streams um John I know that you've been watching The Prisoner exchanges very carefully um during this uh very delicate and uh you know tenuous uh pause period um what can you tell us about the nature of these exchanges so far and uh what what can we expect yeah I mean that's really again hard to follow uh hard to hard act to follow when we're talking about those things but I just think that anyone watching right now who's seen the display the scenes of uh the Palestinian children because it's overwhelmingly children some women uh who are released um and you compare the sort of sick inhumane depravity of what we're talking about about Israel and then you car you you juxtapose that with these kids getting out of prison and coming out principled U defiant and just showing their humanity and I think one of the things that's important about these prisoner exchanges that is unprecedented is that um normally when kids and and people come out of prison in Palestine they're actually not uh gung-ho to tell everybody the story of their torture um and and what they went through out of respect for the people who are still in prison and we saw that in these releases as well but because of the collective nature of these releases it's given people the ability um and the platform to actually talk about what happened to them just right away just as uh right off um you know right off the cuff just honest Impressions and the things that we've seen from these kids have all been the stories are all the same nobody tells a different story um the first day of the war they took these kids who were already in isolation and they beat them look at the kids we've seen footage of them coming out with broken arms and two black eyes talking about two of them sharing one plate of food look at that kid is just wearing his prison uniform Israel just basically threw them out in their uh in their prison uniforms didn't give them their clothes um didn't give an opportunity for their families to bring them anything um they were given no notice that they were being released and these kids are talking about how they don't even know what's going on in Gaza they have complete deprivation there's no electronic anything there's no newspapers they're not visiting with their family they're not seeing their lawyers um they have no idea what's going on in Gaza they're in basic solitary confinement or sometimes with two or three others um but there's no Collective space there's no yard time like in a prison um they're not being fed properly and they're being beaten and the first day of the war Israel showed its Humanity by going in and being mad about what happened in the South where their military collapsed and abandoned their people for an entire day and those same forces decide that the way to uh even the score is to take a 14-year-old kid and beat him up until break his arm in solitary confinement where four or five soldiers pour into their uh cell and beat them and beat them up without any these people haven't been charged they're getting tortured with no idea what the evidence held against them is and when you're watching this boy speak right now he was told be everybody was before they were released that if you speak to the media we'll rearrest you we'll arrest your sister we'll arrest your mother um all kinds of these threats and they get off the bus and walk right up to the media um because they're principled because they're Humane um and because they're speaking for their uh National objectives that are um principled and even like the 14-year-old uh who who got out yesterday I mean they all do it um he he says that you know I'm happy we're happy that we're free but our happy is incomplete um because of the people who are you know this kid's 14 years old uh because of the the people killed um and wounded and missing under the piles of rubble in Gaza um and I just if anyone is watching this that hasn't watched the releases happen um they happen after dark in Palestine um around um the the late evening um and and just watch it it's an unbelievable thing to see after following and being um involved and and being on the streets with these kids for many many years um and and watching um what the toll that it uh the danger of their resistance um ju it's just to me it's been incredible and um it's such an extraordinary moment that um comes with such brutality and depravity but um these scenes that we're seeing are um yeah they're they're just incredible and um to be able to see it on mass like this and um just hope it continues what one on intended consequence I think John of these releases is that uh we've been getting all these interviews in Arabic media not just Al jazer but a lot of local Palestinian media as well interviews with the released people have been released from Israeli captivity and the stories they tell are horrific and consistent and as you pointed out they are in communicado they are in separate prison prisons cut off from one another and cut off from the outside world as most of them are saying we had no idea there was a in Gaza till till we got out uh so that so so what I want to say is we've I don't remember I mean because prisoners are released all the time I mean in people are going in and out of the Israeli prisons so you'll get one or two people released now and then but the effect of this Mass release and the fact that we have these many many interviews all within a concentrated time I think is giving a new sense of the scale of the suffering of the Palestinian prisoners this was already a very uh you know at the top of the list of priorities for Palestinians but I think it's just really highlighted in a way nothing else has at least for uh Palestinian and arabic speaking audiences the the the urgency of freeing the 7 and a half thousand or 7,000 plus people who are currently in prison and Israel's arresting people all the time and it just strikes me too that people who don't have access to Arabic language media just aren't seeing this and they're not kind of understanding The Human Experience that Palestinian uh Palestinians uh held hostage by Israel ex face especially the children yeah especially the children I mean how come there are so many Palestinian children in in prison and some of these kids that come out look so young and so frail and uh you know it's just it's just incredible and they're being released at 3 in the morning that's the thing that's important to note is that PE the Israel is trying its best to prevent what's happening from happening they threatened the people in prison they threatened the families before they summoned their families um to the police stations and threatened them um beforehand they release them in the middle of the night 3 in the morning and there's thousands of people there in the pouring rain in the cold um um to celebrate them and it's important to note that we're seeing kids released right now um and Israel targets the children in the prison system um because they don't have the same access to the to the men in prison because of Decades of struggle inside the prisons by Palestinians um to resist um the deprivation that Israel enforced on them in prison um the men have had uh hunger strikes and the women of course have had hunger strikes um they fight back in the prisons and they have like nominal rights I don't know what you want to call them they get beaten all the time and there's of course a prison SWAT team um that Israel deploys in inside the prison that goes in and attacks people fairly regularly but in between those attacks um the men are at least together in a shared space they have a television they have a radio um they give them one television channel you know it's not like they're they're live in large but they have certain rights um very nominal rights but rights that were fought for um over Decades of hunger strikes um and the kids don't have have that and so Israel doesn't go into the I mean I think we'll probably find out that they did go into the prisons on October 7th and and beat the men as well um but you can see with these children that they're taking the vulnerable isolated children and attacking them and it's just that the cowardice of it is unbelievable it's so consistent with the cowardice that we've seen um in the Gaza Strip there there's no um Humanity um face Toof face with their cap and I think tck's right we want to do we do want to wait and see what people say after um some time um but it's obvious that the the they're not treated like that in Gaza um Palestinians didn't treat galad Shalit like that even though he was a soldier so they don't treat people like Israel treats a teenager um and I think that I just want to say if people haven't watched the releases I I just really tell I would say go and and and try and look for footage of it it's all over you can find it all over like you said it's there there in the Arab media there's reporters on the ground at 3 in the morning waiting for this yesterday Israel didn't let people meet at ofer prison which is where they've been releasing people um and they killed somebody and um trying to push back the demonstration um it's not even a demonstration it's a celebration right Israel has has demanded uh no shows of happiness um for family M it's just what state what yeah and uh you know th you're you're right that uh those those videos people should watch them and we're gonna we're going to be having more coverage of that we're going to bring together an article that includes some of these videos and uh testimonies and highlights them of the palace Palestinians coming out and I should also say uh John that the cowardice that you mentioned of course targeting children arresting them in the middle of the night they're usually uh taken from their beds in the middle of the night in night raids by heavily armed isra soldiers so the psychological impact of of all of this horror and we haven't even scratch the surface of that in terms of the psychological impact on children in Gaza but also children in the West Bank the psychological impact of seeing children executed in the streets by Israeli soldiers as happened yesterday at eight-year-old boy Adam elul who the video of him being just executed by a sniper in in uh in the middle of a street in um in broad daylight in um uh yesterday in the West Bank in Janine and uh another child killed a short time later and now the number of Palestinian children killed in the West Bank uh just since October 7th is is in the dozens uh it's it's you know that's in the West Bank where which is getting very very little attention because of the scale of what's happening in in Gaza and in the West Bank I think the Israelis are becoming more violent and more even more violent if you can believe it and more bold not just the soldiers but the settlers because they they can get away with it and uh they could get away with it before but now there's even lesser tension and outrage so the violence against children is something I think we also we also want to focus on you know we've talked about doing an episode that focuses particularly on that and I think I think that's um yeah especially when you consider how much Phantom Israeli children are talked talked about you know Phantom beheaded babies that don't exist uh and you compare that with the lack of global outrage over those those babies left to die alone in the in the neonatal Care Unit or the that was shot in the back of the head yesterday in the back of the head right right I mean that you know this caused outrage among Palestinians and outrage among some supporters of Palestine but it wasn't eliciting statements from world leaders as it would have if that had been um an an is Israeli child and we they would have convened the UN Security Council it was one child and you know they are already you know all the governments all the Western governments are putting out statements about the shooting attack in Jerusalem uh today which killed three people and which which was said to be a in retaliation for the killing of this these two children yesterday as well as for the sadistic violence that uh is that Israel is meeting out to the prisoners under itar Ben the ultra Ultra farri right kahanist uh n so-called national security minister who is uh in charge of the prisons and who posts videos on social media of prisoners being abused uh and does the and brags about it in this gleeful sadistic manner so that's to point out something I always point out that all the violence that uh israeli's experience is a direct consequence of and reaction to the the the orders of magnitude bigger violence uh that Israel is uh perpetrating against Palestinians every day 247 365 days a year that is just not being reported and people can say oh well you're justifying the attack that happened at the Ramat settlement in which these three Israelis were killed I'm not justifying anything I'm just explaining that to to to uh perpetrate this amount of violence against Millions and millions and millions of Palestinians particularly children and to expect that that no one is going to react no one is going to take up weapons nobody is going to seek revenge or retaliation is a fantasy as long as Palestinians live in this situation it's actually surprising how few of them do that given the scale of the violence against them but I know John we want to talk about you you know let me just that kid that was K killed than Janine the Israelis were leaving after a 12h hour plus raid they were leaving the city they they they were driving out of the city and they stopped and one guy turned back and killed the two people point blank one kid eight years old in the back of the head it just unbelievable unspeakable cowardice and in Canada I know that's not in my news uh here this story even though the there's to like total Round the Clock coverage um you know they'll put blinking on wherever he's traveling but they don't show you the the daily um life of Palestinians and these are what these kids uh are they're seeing people their friends get arrested and they go out in the streets Israel says they're trying to Tamp down on the uprising in the West Bank so that they don't open another front um as if they're scaring kids away the demonstrations get bigger the kids never stop coming out we could have been doing this show in the late 80s and we would be talking about the same thing the number of kids that they sadistically killed in the first inata how disproportionate it was in the second inata I lived in Janine and I watched this happen in front of my eyes um daily because there's daily incursions by uh 65 ton tanks that you don't see the Israelis face in a 65 ton tank and a kid throwing stones at them and the Israelis will shoot the kids uh at particular moments um it's really it's unbelievable if people saw this kind of stuff I I don't know it's to me um just to see this the courage of those kids and we and I'm sure the kids are uh mentally um you know traumatized by what they experience but they don't come out looking like that they come out with their Humanity with their dignity they come out talking about their friends uh in prison who they left behind in the moment where they're free when they're hugging their mother for the first time some of these kids because they get administrative detention so they get six months no charge and then it gets renewed and then it gets renewed again so they they don't even know when they're going to see their mom again they see their mom at 3 in the morning on the street and hug her and in all of that emotion of seeing your family they still are able to turn look to the camera and remember the people um as a 14-year-old to remember to say about the people in Gaza to remember to say about the people that were with you in prison and they'll they'll talk in a human rights report about this kind of stuff um you know individually um asking but like I said before they don't come out of prison talking about as a journalist when I would go around trying to ask people about their prison um experiences often they would talk off the Record um but they didn't want to go on record talking about what happened to them first of all because they all say there's worse things happening to other people inside the prison which when you hear their stories you can't believe that could be possible um but just out of respect um for for what the people that are still inside um are experiencing and when you just think about that human emotion of getting out of prison after a year and a half you're 15 years old um and you hug your family for the first time but you're able to compose yourself and stand in front of the camera and act like you're you know you've been alive for 75 years these kids have experienced so much in this short period of time and their lives and if Israel thinks that they've broken these kids like these kids are not going to uh be part of the struggle it's the opposite um they say they came out and they said like the journalist said well didn't they say don't speak to the media and the kid said yes and and the journalist said like don't do interviews like this and the kid said yes like you know we don't care um because Israel's going to arrest them for whatever they want so there the the pretense of like oh you try to behave no they come out of prison defiant um and and when we're watching this just brutality in Gaza um and you just juxtapose it with the Dignity of these kids coming out of prison I I just think it needs to be said and I think I've said it a few times now but I just think that it's so important to see um and to just ask to imagine asking a an eighth or ninth grade kid who's just been through all of this and has no idea what happened in Gaza they're on the bus processing uh in the hours bus ride uh from their prison you know the only reason the kids said that they knew what happened in Gaza because their torturers tortured them and beat them um and threatened um sexual violence on their family members um because of something that happened in Gaza that's so that's their only knowledge their lawyer didn't tell them their family didn't get to write a letter um it's total um deprivation of all information um and so can you just imagine the enormity of what we've um been watching for the last 50 days and to have these kids because they weren't told days in advance that they were getting released the kids told the stories um that they were summoned they said they were being summoned to interrogation which means you're about to be beaten and tortured um summoned them to interrogation they showed up in the interrogation room they were threatened um and told they were being released and the kids had no idea what the they would be released for they didn't know that they were part of the you know one of the most historic prisoner exchanges in history um they they had no idea um what's happening and they're able to digest in that short amount of time and maintain their Humanity um they don't even come out um you know spitting anger um it's just a like a calm dignified um presence that it's just remarkable to watch yeah John it Nora go ahead no no no I was gonna I was gonna encourage you to to oh okay yes I mean 100% John uh the and and more will come out and and these these experiences of children again have to be really recorded and known because this is something that is happening to hundreds and hundreds of Palestinian children every year and it is only the prisoner swap that highlighted it but let's look at uh we wanted to look at this this incredible video I mean we we keep talking about the videos put out by Kasam and they are they they get more and more compelling and interesting almost every day and so this is U the release of a group of Israelis from Gaza uh yesterday I'm going to say but every day feels like a week so it seems like longer but it was yesterday and as we see here these are a couple of Israeli uh these are some some of the Israelis being released and it's interesting how they edited this video these are two Israelis and as I understand John uh the deal includes the release of uh women and other Israelis under 19 and here the the this guy in the gray jacket is ITV and we've we should run this a second time because and and with the sound if we can I don't know if that's possible toor uh let let's run that clip again because there's this extraordinary exchange between itai and and this young Israeli woman who is like waving and saying goodbye goodbye and this woman here says shukr let's run it with the sound [Applause] yeah [Music] the conat goodbye welcome guys good luck goodbye congratulations good luck byebye shuk bye-bye you go home bye that's the ti ERS hugging the Hamas soldiers know jokes Yeah by allahar well obviously they had Stockholm syndrome right well I mean obviously you know it it looked for all the world like these were tourists who are just going home from their vacation of course we know it wasn't we don't want to belittle or dismiss the experience they've been through they were separated from their families detained uh in difficult conditions no matter how well they were looked after and it's clear they were looked after to the best of the ability of of those who had responsibility for them uh and so though it's certainly a traumatic experience we shouldn't belittle that but for all that this is pretty extraordinary as toak had said uh he never shook hands or greeted or smiled with any of his jailers and as we've also commented no Palestinian comes out of Israeli prison cracking jokes with those who' have just been torturing them yeah what is going on here uh it's it's also the thing I would say that's been so kind of funny I mean funny again we're looking for lightness and humor wherever we can because we're surrounded by so much horror and and so it's one of the ways we cope is looking at the reaction of many Israelis online and Israel supporters who seem utterly enraged by the fact that these civilians are coming out of Gaza looking relatively relaxed healthy um happy to go home for sure but not but they're not looking miserable tortured emaciated uh so it's almost like a lot of Israelis either wanted them dead or wanted them to have suffered much more than they already did going through this experience and I should also note we we just showed that scene because it's so extraordinary but a lot of the uh Israeli civilians coming out just look neutral or just look like people who are under I don't know they're surrounded by noise they're in a they don't look particular uh happy or they're not GRE you know not everyone who leaves Gaza is greeting their former capts in this friendly smiling way so it's not as if Hamas or you know the the Hamas media people who are releasing these videos are hiding that they're also showing us the people who are just they're in fact showing us everyone who leaves Gaza and of course they have an interest in that because they want to show the world that when we handed these people over to the Red Cross they were this is the condition they were in they were in good health there were some elderly people some disabled people uh people with disabilities who were either in wheelchairs or who were carried by um Palestinian fighters to the ambulances or to the Red Cross vehicles but they want to show that this is how we are handing people over so that Israel can't turn around later and say oh these people left in this horrible condition so we're seeing everyone and not everyone is smiling and happy but there are enough smiling and happy people let's say obviously there's one good reason to be smiling and happy is that you're going home but beyond that what what is going on here this is this is pretty uh some people have been saying Stockholm syndrome but that's a myth that's being busted you know Stockholm syndrome isn't a real thing this idea that that people kidnapped fall in love or become in awe of their their captors um and even if it were real as we said Palestinians aren't catching this Stockholm syndrome when they're coming out of isra prison so what is it we're looking at here the other thing I would say about this um sorry John just brief very briefly the other thing I would say about these video is really interesting is they really undermine the sort of uh the the new Israeli propaganda we've seen in the last couple of months of Hamas equals Isis right because I don't remember any prisoners ever being released by ISIS to my knowledge you know um they were always brutally executed yeah let alone like shaking their hands and being handed over to the Red Cross yeah no no I mean I think it shows that they're being treated well which is what um was the same with gilad Shalit and what um Kasam promised from the start and I think when you compare it to the no charges for Israeli kids where they have no idea when they're getting out or what's going on um Israeli media reported that um Hamas leader Yahya sinir visited the captives on the first day or the second day um and told them exactly what was coming that you would be well taken care of that you're all going to stay together uh you know you'll be with people um and that you're in the safest place um in Gaza and so I think that's an important thing to note that that they they knew that they knew that they were being treated well and that there was going to be an end to um to the to what the ordeal that they were going through which um which is very significant compared to the sort of trauma of having no idea what's going on I think another thing that's interesting from those videos from II is that it's clear that he's talking to the person that he knows and they're they're being held by the people that are releasing them um Cam's not sending um you know some delegate to release these people they're they're being held by senior leadership um and they're being released by senior leadership which is also what happened with gilad shalid uh Ahmed Jabari and ryad al- atar the two most important um Kasam commanders were literally the people the two people that handed over gillad Shalit at the Rafa Crossing and what that video with II seems to show is that they um that their captors were the the people releasing them were the people that held them and we know from letters um that Kasam published from from one of the captives that they were calling um the Kasam people generals and so they're being held by senior leadership who's treating them well and then it where they're supposed to be hiding in their tunnels um they're out in the middle of Gaza City handing over Prisoners the actual people who held the prisoners they're not hiding and sending delegates to do it um and I think that that's a significant um thing to note as well because people are talking about um eradicating Hamas Kasam has the ability to send with the captors the people who held them and that's part of what we're seeing is that there's a familiarity between the people and the people that are uh holding them in that moment they're not just random um you know faceless Kasam uh uh Fighters or or prisoners uh prison guards like in Israel that um you know you don't have any idea who they are they rotate all the time um so I think that that shows also that they um there's a command and control structure clearly Is Still Remains with Kasam they're able to do these prisoner exchanges um nimbly they're able to change names with International mediators so they're clearly still um completely intact and able to carry out the most important task that the Israelis want them to carry out which is to give back um the captive so I think it it defies um Israel's um position or or propaganda uh just so many different layers of it and John uh just one of the remarkable scenes I think also from yesterday but there have been so many was the young Israeli woman being released with her pet dog uh who had been with her throughout uh that entire uh experience so uh the the dog uh obviously survived and obviously was being being fed and so they cared enough to make sure that she could remain with her her dog who I'm sure was of of great support to her during that experience thanks for watching this video please subscribe to our YouTube channel hit like leave a comment these engagements help us with the YouTube algorithm and it helps us to get around Silicon Valley censorship as much as possible it does make a difference you can also support our journalism by going to electronic in.net and clicking on donate now thank you for