Time Is Latest To Correct After Conflating Hostages, Palestinian Prisoners

By: Tamar Sternthal October 16, 2025

The Oct. 14 front-page photo arrangement this week at The New York Times International Edition juxtaposing released hostages alongside released Palestinian prisoners is a  graphic illustration of well-established inverse media reflexes: erasing the hostages and exculpating hardcore terrorists.

For the last two years, CAMERA has pushed back against the journalistic temptation to conflate Israeli and foreign hostages held against international law in the Gaza Strip with convicted Palestinian terrorists and security detainees. With the release of Israeli and foreign hostages this week in exchange for the release of convicted Palestinian terrorists and security detainees, CAMERA again battles the media’s stubborn hostage-prisoner shuffle, prompting corrections at Haaretz, The Jerusalem Post, and most recently Time.

A grossly inaccurate heading, “Exchange of hostages,” appeared in Time’s Oct. 9 article entitled “Israel Pulls Back Troops as Gaza Ceasefire Takes Effect.”
The Palestinian prisoners and detainees released this week were not “hostages.” The Oxford dictionary defines a “hostage” as “a person who is captured and held prisoner by a person or group, and who may be injured or killed if people do not do what the person or group is asking.” That is clearly not the case with the released Palestinians in question.
This formulation, like the New York Times and El Pais photo spreads, place Israeli and foreign nationals kidnapped on Oct. 7 by a proscribed terror group and threatened with murder, for the primary purpose of gaining the release of terrorists in Israeli jails, on equal moral footing with hundreds of convicted terrorists serving life terms along with 1,718 Gaza detainees who were arrested as unlawful combatants during the war. 
Time agreed with CAMERA’s objection that the “Exchange of hostages” heading was problematic, and commendably replaced it with accurate wording: “Release of hostages and prisoners.”
Separately, however, the Time article suffers from other significant shortcomings. It cites, for instance,  the International Association of Genocide Scholars, the United Nations Commission of Inquiry and the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification as if their claims of Israeli-imposed genocide and famine have not been completely stripped of all credibility.

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