During the release of Gazan Palestinian prisoners following the announcement of the ceasefire, a video circulated on social media that had Palestinians expressing laughter and pride in their people’s capacity to find humour even amid genocide. Hussam, just released, leaned out of the bus window and called to his brother among the crowd, asking if their mother was alive.
Despite his brother's reassurance, Hussam looked worried and asked again. His brother replied, "Don't worry, mother is in Egypt drinking cola… everyone else is fine".
Hussam then asked about the rest of the family, and his brother reassured him once more, adding with a faint laugh, "Man, just my mother-in-law died yesterday… your wife and everyone else are waiting for you".
The video ends with humour that cuts through despair, as the brother laughs and says, "prepare from now, no meat, chicken…and no eggs".
Scenes like this reveal the different meanings that release carries. When Israelis are released, the story centres on individual rescue: tears, reunions, safety, closure. It is a humanitarian frame, the hostage restored to private life. When Palestinians are freed, the moment is never private.
The crowds share tears and intense reunions, but also humour and pride, there are also questions about who is alive, and never closure, for release remains part of an ongoing struggle.
Liberal grammar of equivalence
The language of hostages entered the narrative after October 2023. Pro-Palestinian voices insist on using hostage instead of political prisoner to expose Western media’s complicity in genocide, where, as in settler-colonial contexts, selective language reveals how the humanisation of the settler depends on the dehumanisation of the colonised.
The emphasis on the term grew during prisoner exchanges, when headlines declared "Israeli hostages exchanged for Palestinian prisoners", provoking critique over the absence of 'Palestinian hostages'. Supporters' use of hostage seeks to expose the selectivity that determines whose life and suffering count and the violence it conceals.
Nevertheless, rejecting political prisoner in favour of hostage erases the colonial relation of domination and the decades-long Palestinian struggle for this recognition. However well-intentioned, hostage carries a moral connotation of innocence and victimhood, that omits the history of prisoners' struggle and strips it of political meaning, recasting life within the cell as a humanitarian plea.
While pushback against Western propaganda is necessary, the terms of that pushback matter. Using their language traps solidarity within liberal vocabularies that measure legitimacy through suffering, balance and civility.
The call to replace political prisoners with hostages mirrors liberalism's appetite for symmetry: suffering must be paired, victims equivalent, violence mutual. This aesthetic of balance soothes liberal conscience while concealing the structure of colonial power. The story becomes tidy: if there are Israeli hostages, there must be Palestinian ones.
The equivalence implied by hostage imagines a reversible relation between coloniser and colonised, as if domination were exchangeable and captivity mutual, imposing negotiation into a structure based on elimination.
Prisoner exchanges do happen, but they are enforced through anti-colonial resistance. The status of hostage presumes exchangeable value, but incarceration is not a relation of exchange. Palestinians are not held to be traded but to be neutralised. This was as so often, made visible in 2021 through the mass arrests of '48 Palestinians, whose participation in the Uprising of Dignity unsettled the perceived fragmentation of the Palestinian people.
Liberal frameworks turn politics into performance: balance replaces justice, civility displaces confrontation. Years of humanitarian reporting have trained those in solidarity to win it for Palestinians through victimhood. Hostage becomes what makes Palestinians legible to donors and audiences, stripping the political and the possibility for struggle itself.
This critique is not driven by a desire to romanticise the timeless, heroic, sacrificial Palestinian, for such idealisation is a cruel, dispossessing act. Rather, it rests on a fight over a narrative that cannot be waged through terms that make empathy conditional.
Translating the struggle
The question of how to name Palestinians in prison reveals how resistance itself is translated and understood. There is a question over whether political prisoner is the correct translation, or whether political captive is a better option. Both depend on context, audience and purpose.
Arabic terms circulate with distinct horizons of meaning: asir (captive), mu'taqal siyasi (political detainee), sajin siyasi (political prisoner) and al-haraka al-asira, literally the captive movement, but officially translated as the Palestinian prisoners' movement.
Critics note that this is an unfortunate translation because in Arabic, political prisoner/detainee describes those incarcerated by an internal regime rather than a foreign one. The definition and use of asir refers to those captured by a foreign power, and in Palestine, as once in Algeria, names colonial incarceration.
In English, captive carries connotations of a hostage, and while it can describe someone taken in war or conquest, it is rooted in being seized and held against one’s will. The term denotes possession in which the possibility of agency lies entirely with the captor. When hostage is used and political captive not recognised, insisting on a 'literal' translation risks obscuring meaning.
The prisoners' movement developed in parallel with the PLO, whose language and strategy were shaped through exchange with other revolutionary forces. The term political prisoner travelled across anti-colonial struggles, from Angola to Vietnam and Ireland, whose hunger strikes inspired Palestinians. Translation here is not technical but political; it emerges through encounter, carries intent, and generates solidarity across movements.
This is not a call to replace one translation with another. While political prisoner provides a shared language for solidarity, political captive maintains fidelity to how Palestinians identify themselves. The insistence on the specificity of the colonial condition remains fundamental, provided the sentiment does not slide into exceptionalism.
What is at stake is not simply how Palestinians are named but how captivity became a site of confrontation and transformation, the ground of a collective political struggle, a political compass for those beyond the cells. Survival occurred through the political, through organisation and struggle, whereas enduring-till-rescue belonged to the category of the hostage. It is this distinction that reveals the stakes of the unprecedented levels of assault on prisoners today.
Political prisoners at the centre
The formation of the national liberation movement had political prisoners at its centre; they were the "soldiers on the front line", symbols of national identity and revolutionary consciousness that emerged after the "years of disorientation" following the Nakba.
Similar to other anti-colonial movements, a struggle was waged for prisoners' status to be recognised as political, and although never formally granted, colonial authorities revealed a de-facto recognition.
The first group of political prisoners following the 1967 war sought to establish themselves as political by separating themselves from criminally convicted prisoners through the allocation of different cells.
Prisoners organised protests and went on hunger strikes, and from the mid-1970s built democratic structures, dividing cells along organisational lines, coordinating across factions and developing philosophies of surviving torture and steadfastness.
The prison became a site of revolutionary pedagogy, with prison literature (adab al-sujun) serving as a record of political formation that inspired Palestinians and movements across the world. What happened outside the cell shaped what was possible inside, just as resistance inside reconfigures the political climate beyond.
Evidence of this dynamic can be traced to the early exchanges that elevated prisoners from isolation to figures of the national struggle. The first prisoner exchange took place in 1968, when the PFLP secured the release of sixteen prisoners. Three years later, Fateh’s first prisoner was freed in another exchange, marking what is commemorated as Palestinian Prisoners' Day.
The pattern culminated in 1985, when 1,150 Palestinian and Lebanese prisoners were freed in exchange for three Israeli soldiers.
Across the decades, hunger strikes generated mobilisation beyond the prisons, altering policies, and winning and losing hard-fought gains. From ending and later reversing force-feeding and easing overcrowding to securing food, sanitation and education rights, these struggles moved through cycles of resistance and retaliation. Each period of gain was followed by another crackdown, most evident today with the stripping away of basic rights since October 2023.
Hierarchy of innocence
The term hostage claims innocence for those caught in violence unintentionally. It carries a logic of choice that reduces a collective condition to an individual question: those who 'had no choice' are rendered innocent while those who act are tainted by guilt, reproducing a hierarchy of innocence. This sustains the blameless victim and in its most generous form, extends to those who resist only in ways acceptable to liberal civility.
Zionist carcerality operates through a pre-emptive logic, holding thousands under administrative detention. While hostage is a victim of circumstance, the incarceration of Palestinians, whether targeted or arrested by chance, is never random but systematic. Their imprisonment reflects where they stand in Zionism’s eyes: a demographic threat.
Within such a system, objections to the term political prisoner, especially for children, reveal the difficulty of reconciling innocence with politics. To describe children as political is never simple. It carries a weight that feels unbearable, as if it strips away the purity childhood is meant to hold.
Yet, that difficulty reveals how settler colonialism seeps into the texture of living. It unsettles the ordinary, filtering into humour, but also into intimacy and love, where affection is entangled with loss; where, as Gazan testimonies recount, being together means sleeping in the same bed so that if a missile strikes, everyone dies and no one is left behind.
Emphasising the political demands a shift in how solidarity is understood, not as reformist or rooted in moral equivalence, but grounded in active involvement. The hostage frame calls for protection and rescue through outside intervention. But this obscures the responsibility of those invested in producing it, masking what solidarity requires: confrontation by a co-conspirator, not care that pleads for protection through a 'higher power'.
This structure depends on Palestinians remaining legible as victims, reproducing the hierarchies they need to resist. The demand for innocence sets the terms of what can be said or done. Narratives that do not fit the script, those of former prisoners or families whose experiences are too militant or complex, struggle to find space.
Those in solidarity operate under this pressure, not through deliberate self-censorship but because the liberal field of recognition rewards moderation and civility. The result is a narrowing of possibility: support becomes conditional on innocence, limiting who can be defended and how defence is imagined.
The insistence on the political prisoner demands a solidarity that accepts complicity, risk and political work. History shows that confrontation, not moral pleading, is what unsettles the structures of domination that make incarceration possible.
Wael Omar is a doctoral researcher working at the intersection of political theory and social movements.
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