ABC’s woeful moral equivalence

The release on Saturday of three more hostages – emaciated and frail, their eyes sunken and frames skeletal after 491 days of depraved imprisonment in Hamas’s dystopian tunnels – recalled the shocking images of Holocaust survivors emerging from Nazi concentration camps 80 years ago when the civilised world pledged “never again”.

Yet hours after the three Israelis – Eli Sharabi, 52; Or Levy, 34; and Ohad Ben Ami, 56 – were handed over, ABC radio morning news bulletins were leading not on what the hostages’ horrifying appearance said about the terrorists but on the alleged woes of the 183 Palestinian prisoners (serving sentences after proper court trials) released by Israel in the latest stage of the Gaza ceasefire.

It would be hard to imagine a more outrageous case of what only can be poor news judgment or deliberate bias by our taxpayer-funded public broadcaster.

Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar was right when he said despairingly: “The pictures don’t lie. The Hamas terrorists look great and the Gaza residents (who were cheering Hamas) look great. (Only) the Israeli hostages look like Holocaust survivors.”

In matters of human rights and the treatment of prisoners there is, unquestionably, always a need to expose violations, whoever commits them.

But to prioritise the alleged maltreatment of the released Palestinian prisoners ahead of that of the Israeli hostages brings the ABC’s invariably contentious Middle East news judgment and coverage to a new low.

No legitimate or even vaguely sensible comparison can be made between the obvious maltreatment – including acute starvation – of the three innocent Israeli hostages whose appearance shocked the civilised world on Saturday and the Palestinian prisoners handed over at the same time.

Palestinian prisoners being exchanged, as The Jerusalem Post noted, are not hostages; they are convicted criminals, many guilty of terrorism and murder.

Every Palestinian prisoner is entitled to family visits monitored by the Red Cross. They receive complete medical care.

The horrifying appearance of the three Israelis provides further confirmation, as if it were needed, of the reality that Hamas’s hostages are people whose lives have been reduced to the status of bargaining chips by the terrorists.

Hamas’s actions contradict every known concept of human decency.

The world should recoil at the pure evil that was on display on Saturday.

And the ABC’s editorial pooh-bahs should learn the lesson of what took place during the Holocaust and what happened on October 7, 2023.