Samidoun: “Israeli” occupation is killing its own captive soldiers and Palestinian prisoners

• The Zionist regime is committed to killing its own prisoners in order to keep the fascist Netanyahu government in power, to continue the genocide in Gaza, and to keep Palestinian prisoners tortured behind occupation bars

On Saturday afternoon, 7 June, Abu Obeida, the military spokesperson of the Izz el-Din al-Qassam Brigades, issued an urgent statement, declaring:

“Urgent warning to whomever it may concern: The occupation forces are besieging a place where the Zionist prisoner Matan Zangauker is located. We affirm categorically that the enemy will not be able to recover him alive. If this prisoner is killed during an attempt to free him, the occupation army will be the one responsible for his death, after we preserved his life for a year and 8 months. He who warns is excused.”

This is only the latest example of the occupation regime’s killing and attempts to kill its own prisoners — occupation soldiers captured by the Palestinian resistance in the Al-Aqsa Flood operation on 7 October 2023. This has come not only through repeated airstrikes where the occupation claims that the Palestinian resistance is holding Zionist prisoners, which has taken the lives of dozens of captives, but also through the direct assassination of several prisoners who managed to escape amid an ongoing series of attacks and airstrikes.

“The Zionist regime is committed to killing its own prisoners in order to keep the fascist Netanyahu government in power, to continue the genocide in Gaza, and to keep Palestinian prisoners tortured behind occupation bars,” said Charlotte Kates, international coordinator of Samidoun Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network. “It is the Palestinian resistance who has kept these prisoners alive for 20 months, and released them in far better conditions than Palestinian prisoners held in Zionist dungeons, despite the genocidal US-Zionist bombing and their deliberate imposition of famine and starvation against Palestinians in Gaza.”

In a conversation with Samidoun, Dr. Basem Naim, a member of the political bureau of Hamas, said: “The Islamic Resistance Movement, Hamas, affirms, its readiness to release all ‘Israeli’ prisoners in a comprehensive and dignified exchange that will lead to the end of the war and the complete withdrawal of the occupation forces from Gaza, with assurances that humanitarian aid will enter Gaza immediately and effectively.”

“The policy that Netanyahu is insisting on using since the beginning of the aggression has led only to the killing of more of the Zionist prisoners. The release of the Zionist prisoners alive to their families has come consistently through negotiations and an agreed upon mechanism,” Naim said.

Abu Obeida’s statement further underlines the Zionist regime’s use of the “Hannibal directive,” a military order in the “Israeli” Occupation Forces that requires the IOF to use all means to prevent the capture of occupation soldiers by resistance fighters in Palestine and Lebanon. The resistance forces capture occupation soldiers and hold them prisoner in order to exchange them for thousands of Palestinian and Arab political prisoners jailed by the occupation and held in torturous conditions. The IOF has implemented the Hannibal directive at wide scale during the genocide in Gaza and particularly on 7 October 2023, during the Al-Aqsa Flood operation, with IOF tanks and helicopters engaging in large-scale shelling and bombing of areas where resistance fighters were operating, killing hundreds of Zionists alongside Palestinians, with one occupation soldier referring to it as a “mass Hannibal.”

“It is clear from decades of experience that a prisoner exchange is the only effective mechanism to liberate Palestinian prisoners from Zionist jails,” said Kates. “However, it is also clear that a prisoner exchange is the only effective means to free Zionist prisoners held by the Palestinian resistance. It is the resistance that has been working to keep their prisoners alive, at the same time that over 70 Palestinian prisoners have been martyred inside occupation prisons through torture, deliberate starvation, and medical neglect.”

Earlier, the Al-Qassam Brigades released a video of Zangauker, in which he affirmed that the actions of the Netanyahu government — particularly repeatedly refusing a ceasefire, withdrawal from Gaza and a prisoner exchange — are keeping him imprisoned.

“Not only is this a joint genocide, with the US providing billions of dollars in arms, intelligence and surveillance information, and diplomatic and political cover including the repeated use of the veto at the United Nations, but the US has also played a particularly nefarious role in undermining a prisoner exchange and preventing an end to the genocide and the withdrawal of occupation forces in Gaza,” Kates noted. “Rather than living up to its responsibility to provide humanitarian aid and allow the thousands of trucks waiting at the crossings to enter Gaza after the Palestinian resistance acted in good faith to release Zionist-American captive Edan Alexander, it has imposed a series of so-called ‘aid distribution’ centers that are, in reality, centers of death and destruction where hundreds of Palestinians have been martyred and injured seeking relief from the Zionist-imperialist imposed famine.”

There are currently over 10,000 Palestinian prisoners held inside occupation prisons, with thousands more from Gaza who have been forcibly disappeared and their fate undisclosed. Palestinian prisoners are being subjected to extreme torture and starvation — alongside the genocide in Gaza — while the leadership of the Palestinian prisoners’ movement are held in isolation, routinely beaten, and targeted for a policy of “slow assassination.” The Zionist-imperialist genocide in Gaza has already taken the lives of over 54,000 Palestinian martyred and injured — often severely — hundreds of thousands, most frequently with US-made weaponry. Fellow imperialist powers, including Britain, Canada, Germany and France, continue to engage in the arms trade with the Zionist regime, while simultaneously engaging in harsh repression against anti-genocide campaigners in their own countries.