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Hostages and prisoners
From KiriPedia, the archive of John Kiriakou's on-record words
Based on 1 recorded interview · Last updated
John Kiriakou's objection to the vocabulary of the Gaza war — that Israelis held by Hamas are called hostages while Palestinians held by Israel without charge are called prisoners — which he treats as one instance of a wider pattern in which allies have governments and adversaries have regimes.
Hostages and prisoners is John Kiriakou’s objection to the terminology used about detainees on the two sides of the Gaza war, raised in July 2025 as the United States walked out of the talks in Qatar on the grounds that Hamas was not serious about hostage releases.[1]
The question
“Why is it that we call Israelis held by Hamas hostages and Palestinians held by Israel prisoners?” Kiriakou asks — “when they haven’t been charged with any crime, they were just scooped up only because they happen to be Palestinian.”[1]
His own answer is not legal but political: “because Israel is a nation state and we love them.”[2] He immediately generalises it to a second case in which the same choice is made for the same reason — “if it’s Iran, it’s the regime. If it’s France, it’s the government” — and calls the whole habit “all this loaded language.”[2]
The scale of the detention
The force of the objection, in his account, rests on numbers rather than on nomenclature alone. The Israelis, he says, are “sitting on top of thousands and thousands of uncharged” detainees who “are political prisoners is what they got”, and who are “subjected to all sorts of humiliating treatment.”[3]
Sourced from John Kiriakou's on-record public statements. See his profile for the full body of his interviews, podcast appearances, and short-form video.
