Taking hostages is a war crime prohibited under the Geneva Conventions of 1949. 

The International Convention against the Taking of Hostages defines the offence as the seizure or detention of a person, combined with a threat to kill, injure or to continue to detain that person, in order to compel a third party to do - or to abstain from doing - something as an explicit or implicit condition for the hostage’s release.

One high-profile example of hostage taking occurred in the Dubrovka Theatre in Moscow in 2002, when Chechen terrorists took more than 900 people hostage and demanded Russia’s withdrawal from Chechnya. 

Another was the siege of the Iranian embassy in London in 1981, when Iranian Arab separatists took 26 people hostage and demanded the Iranian government release prisoners from the Khuzestan Province, which they wanted to be independent of Iran. 

The International Criminal Court uses the same definition as the Convention, while adding that the demanded behaviour of the third party could be a condition not only for the release of the hostage but also for preserving their safety.

According to the International Committee of the Red Cross: “It is the specific intent that characterises hostage-taking and distinguishes it from the deprivation of someone’s liberty as an administrative or judicial measure”. 

International legal definitions do not specify that the term hostage only applies to civilians, meaning the term hostage would also apply to soldiers taken from Israel during the 2023 attack.

Soldiers captured while fighting in a war, however, are considered prisoners of war and not hostages.

Detainees are people seized and deprived of their liberty. They can include civilians as well as prisoners of war. 

In general, arbitrary detention is a violation of international humanitarian law and human rights law. However, there are exceptions when it is deemed absolutely necessary for security reasons, which applies in situations of military occupation.

What constitutes absolute necessity is open to legal interpretation but examples could include when there is legitimate reason to believe a person may be a spy or saboteur.

Prisoners are people deprived of their liberty following a criminal conviction in a court of law.

Hamas has clearly used the people captured during the October 2023 attack as leverage in ceasefire negotiations with Israel. Both Israel and Hamas have referred to those held in Gaza as hostages. 

The hostages included Israeli soldiers and civilians, ranging from infants to elderly people, as well as a number of non-Israelis and dual nationals. Among the hostages, there were Thai, Nepalese, Filipino, US, Russian, German, British, Irish, Argentine and Tanzanian nationals. 

Palestinians fighters recorded many of the abductions with body cameras. 

Their capture ultimately led to exchanges of captives between the Palestinian group and Israel as part of a truce agreement that took effect on 19 January 2025, and during an earlier ceasefire in November 2023.  

On 10 October 2023, just a few days after the attack on Israel that led to retaliatory airstrikes on Gaza which killed hundreds of people, Hamas threatened to execute civilian hostages if the Israeli bombing of civilians did not stop.

“From this moment on, we announce that every targeting of our people who are safe in their homes without prior warning [by Israel] will be met with regret by the execution of one of our enemy’s civilian hostages,” Hamas said in a message on Telegram, adding that they would broadcast the killings. 

Initially, Hamas wanted to exchange all the hostages it had taken for all Palestinians held in Israeli prisons. This was rejected by Israel. 

“It comes down to why people are being detained,” explains Shane Darcy, deputy director of the Irish Centre for Human Rights in the School of Law at the University of Galway. 

Because Hamas have made demands alongside threats against the captives, referring to those people as hostages is not controversial, Darcy says. 

The Israeli soldiers seized during the October 2023 attack are considered hostages along with the civilians taken by Hamas and other groups, explains Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur for the Occupied Palestinian Territories. 

“All the Israelis who were captured were captured as bargaining chips. This was very clear and Hamas has said so. They (the soldiers) were not captured in Gaza while combatting, they were captured in Israel and taken back to Gaza. This is why they are all considered hostages,” Albanese says. 

After more than a month of fighting following the October attack, over 9,000 people had been killed in the Israeli siege, bombardment and invasion of the Gaza Strip before a ceasefire agreement was reached in late November 2023. 

That agreement saw a seven-day pause in fighting and the handing over of 70 Israelis in exchange for 210 Palestinians, as well as the entry of some humanitarian aid into Gaza. 

As of March 2025 Israel was holding captive 1,486 sentenced prisoners, 2,960 remand detainees and 3,405 administrative detainees held without trial. There were also 1555 people held as "unlawful combatants", according to the Israeli human rights NGO Hamoked. 

The Israeli detention system has been shown in multiple investigations to be the scene of abuse, torture and sexual assault. 

The legal status of Palestinians held in Israeli prisons and detention centres is “a bit less straightforward” than that of the hostages held in Gaza, Darcy says. 

This is because subsets of the imprisoned population fall into a number of categories. 

“There are whole layers of illegality around it,” says Darcy of the Israeli incarceration system.

Some Palestinians in Israeli prisons are there following convictions for criminal offences, like orchestrating suicide bombings in Israel, for example. Those people, some of whom were released during captive exchanges with Hamas, are certainly prisoners. 

Many others, including children, are detained indefinitely without due process in what Israel calls “Administrative Detention”.  

According to the Israeli human rights NGO B’Tselem, “Israel routinely uses administrative detention and has, over the years, placed thousands of Palestinians behind bars for periods ranging from several months to several years, without charging them, without telling them what they are accused of, and without disclosing the alleged evidence to them or to their lawyers.”

And according to Human Rights Watch: “While the law of occupation permits administrative detention as a temporary and exceptional measure, Israel’s sweeping use of administrative detention on the Palestinian population, more than a half-century into an occupation with no end in sight, far exceeds what the law authorises.”

Israel also abducted and detained thousands of Palestinians in Gaza, the West Bank, and from inside Israel following the October attack. 

Israel has used its Unlawful Combatant law to round up people in Gaza and detaining them for “investigation”. The practice has been described as “a flagrant violation of international humanitarian law” by Amnesty International. 

“While international humanitarian law allows for the detention of individuals on imperative security grounds in situations of occupation, there must be safeguards to prevent indefinite or arbitrary detention and torture and other ill-treatment. This law blatantly fails to provide these safeguards. It enables rampant torture and, in some circumstances, institutionalises enforced disappearance,” said Agnès Callamard, secretary general of Amnesty International.

According to the UN’s Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese, detained Palestinians “largely fall in the category of hostages”.

Albanese made that comment on social media on 1 February 2025 in response to an apology issued by the BBC for its referring to people held in Gaza as “prisoners”, a sign of the politically charged contest over language used during the conflict. 

“At one point in our coverage, we mistakenly called the hostages prisoners and we would like to apologise for that error,” the BBC anchor said.

Some of those released by Israel in the captive exchanges in phase one of the 2025 ceasefire deal, and the brief ceasefire in November 2023, were in prison following criminal convictions.

The majority of those freed from Israeli captivity during exchanges, however, were being held without charge, trial or conviction. Many had been rounded up after the war began. 

Those people were arguably taken hostage in anticipation of the captive exchanges that followed because Israel used them as bargaining chips in ceasefire negotiations, just like the people taken hostage by Palestinian armed groups in October 2023.

When it comes to the groups of people rounded up by Israeli soldiers in Gaza since the October 2023, “you can make that argument” that they are hostages, Shane Darcy says. 

But for Albanese, people abducted and arbitrarily detained by occupation forces across Palestine, including in Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem, are hostages. 

“Most of the people who get arrested are arrested arbitrarily, meaning on grounds that would not constitute an offence under general criminal law,” she says, adding that this is used by Israel “as a repressive tool”.  

“Palestinians might be arrested for crimes but the majority of them are not held on lawful grounds,” she says. 

“All the more, they are detained by an unlawful occupation. Israel uses arrest and detention as a tool to convince the Palestinians to either stay quiet or move out or live in segregated areas. This is very common to apartheid regimes.” 

Explaining why she calls many Palestinians in Israeli custody hostages, Albanese says: 

“They are often unlawfully seized and detained, although they are uninvolved civilians. They are used by Israel to compel the Palestinians as a whole to act in a given way or to refrain from acting. The ultimate goal is to curb the possibility for the Palestinians to resist.

“They are hostages because they are persons uninvolved. They are uninvolved in situations of combat and unlawfully seized and detained as part of Israel's expectation to push the Palestinians to do or not to do (something), to leave, ultimately, the occupied Palestinian territory.” 

While the Israeli authorities don’t issue explicit demands in the same way that Hamas did in relation to their hostages, international law does not require there to be an overt demand in order for captives to be seen as hostages. 

As defined in the International Convention against the Taking of Hostages, the crime can be committed in order to compel another party “to do or abstain from doing any act as an explicit or implicit condition for the release of the hostage”.

“It doesn't need to be that explicit,” says Albanese. 

“Also, there are 75 years of practice, and the Palestinians normally, sometimes not, but most of the time, stop being tormented by Israel when they stop engaging with their struggle for self-determination.”  

Part of the job of a journalist is distilling complex situations into reports that are concise and comprehensible to the average reader, listener or viewer.

This means media outlets tend to use words that are commonly understood by the public, rather than technical terms favoured by experts. Deciding on what those words should be is an exercise fraught with difficulty in the context of conflicts, when emotions are high and propaganda is rampant.

The majority of English-language media outlets have throughout the war in Gaza used the term “hostages” to describe the captives in Gaza and “prisoners” to describe people detained in Israel. The term prisoners, in public discourse rather than legal language, means someone held in a prison, which is why it is used to collectively describe Palestinians held by Israel.

It is the blanket term media outlets use to describe the various groups among the prison population as a whole. Without simplifying like this, it would be impossible to describe the captive exchanges seen during ceasefires in the Gaza war concisely, especially in headlines and introductions.

“Journalists, editors and style guide writers have a very specific role in communicating a reality to audiences who may not have extensive knowledge or the full context of the situation,” says The Journal's editor Sinéad O'Carroll.

“There is a need for clarity of a universal language that makes complex issues understandable and accessible, often within the limits of a headline or bulletin.

“In the case of people detained in Gaza, there have been pertinent questions asked by readers whether the use of the term prisoner is accurate in all cases, but the everyday use and understanding of the word hostage has also to be considered, and the fact that it is used in a less legalistic way by most readers.

“However, there is also an imperative on journalists to explain what people like Francesca Albanese believe to be the true legal situation and, as journalists, we try to ensure we are also attending to that task, and review - in full view of our audiences - why and how we make certain editorial decisions.

"In May 2025 we have had a good example of why these explanations are important - and why, at times, we should explain our language choice. UN Special Rapporteurs wrote of their alarm that children as young as 12 could be handed life sentences for murder or attempted murder if "the act was performed as part of the operations of a terrorist organisation and aimed at advancing its objectives”. The rapporteurs say this amendment to the law will target Palestinian children and that they will be treated as if they were adults. Within that amendment, Israeli legislators have differentiated between child 'security prisoners' and child 'criminal prisoners', adding a whole other layer of complexity to the issue of language during the blockade and assault on Gaza."