Only One of the Claims Freed Palestinian Prisoner Makes About Israel Could Possibly be True

Sami Jaradat offers lurid fantasies of Israeli terror and torture of Palestinian prisoners: “Freed Palestinian recounts ‘deliberate starvation’ practices in Israeli prisons,” Middle East Monitor, February 5, 2025:

The freed prisoner, on whom the marks of beating are still visible on his neck, said he and 19 other prisoners were supposed to be sent to Egypt but were instead “deceptively” and “violently” thrown near Gaza’s borders.

Anyone can beat himself around the neck, or anywhere else, with sufficient strength to leave a mark. Tens of millions of Shi’a Muslims engage in Tatbir, or self-flagellation, on the day known as Ashura, during the month of Muharram. Think of how the Shi’a whip themselves bloody when they observe Muharram. If there are any marks of beatings on Jaradat, they are not from the Israeli prison guards, who are under strict orders to treat the prisoners humanely, and despite every conceivable provocation by those prisoners, those guards manage manfully to do so.

“Israeli soldiers threw the prisoners out of the bus while they were handcuffed and beat them severely,” he said.

Three pinocchios. Do you think it plausible that the IDF, with journalists’ cameras trained on them as the handover of those prisoners brought in the bus to be transferred to the waiting Red Cross vehicles, would “throw the prisoners” — in handcuffs, mind you — out of the bus, and then “beat them severely” in the full view of the crowd? The sheer craziness of Jaradat’s charges leaves one agape.

The released prisoners were forced to walk three kilometres to reach their destination….

That’s a total of 1.8 miles. Is that supposed to be a hardship?

According to Israeli daily, Haaretz, Red Cross representatives were “angry” over the way Israel released the last batch of Palestinian prisoners last week as they were led out in shackles with their hands behind their heads.

Led out “in shackles with their hands behind their heads”? Well, isn’t that one way of preventing sudden lunges by these prisoners on the Israeli guards who were in charge of transferring them to the Red Cross? Is this really a cause to be “angry”? Doesn’t it make violence on the part of the prisoners being freed impossible? And isn’t that a good thing? Haaretz, by the way, is a far-left Israeli newspaper that is scarcely distinguishable from the Palestinian press in the way it eagerly disseminates every claim made against Israel and the IDF.

Unlike the frail Palestinian detainees, the freed Israeli captives from Gaza appeared in good health, dressed neatly and were given gifts upon their release.

I’ve taken a good look at various photographs of those freed Palestinian prisoners. They look the picture of health with good muscle tone, ruddy complexions. No hollowed-out or sallow faces among them. Not one looks “frail.” But just compare to their faces the faces of the freed Israeli hostages. The latter were force-fed by their captors in the last weeks before their scheduled release, but it was not enough to remove the sometimes gaunt and always haunted look on their faces. For some, it was the first time in many months that they had been kept in tunnels, saw daylight.

Only one of the charges that Sami Jaradat makes against the Israelis might possibly be true. And that is his claim that the freed prisoners were made to walk 1.8 miles from the buses that brought them from their prisons to the spot where the Red Cross vehicles were waiting. Millions of American schoolchildren walk twice that distance to school and back every day. Only those who live more than two miles to their schools are entitled to be picked up by a school bus. But Sami Jaradat didn’t know that. Perhaps in a later imaginative retelling, he’ll charge the Israelis with making the freed prisoners walk five miles, or even ten, to the Red Cross vehicles. The sky’s the limit when you’re attempting to whip up hatred of the Jewish state.

Middle East Monitor, where this preposterous dunghill of lies appeared, doesn’t tell readers what Sami Jaradat did to deserve his imprisonment. Here’s what: Jaradat, then the head of Palestinian Islamic Jihad in Jenin, masterminded the bombing in Haifa on October 2003 at the Maxim Restaurant — jointly owned by a Israeli Jew and an Israeli Arab — that killed 21 people, including four children, one of them a three-month-old baby. It’s hardly surprising that Middle East Monitor would want to remain silent about his role in such an atrocity.