RNN | The Prisoners’ Affairs Authority reported that 3,985+ Palestinian prisoners were released through three exchange deals during the Al-Aqsa Flood battle (November 2023, February 2025, and October 2025:
The total included:
- 486 serving life sentences
- 114 women
- 297 children
- 33 expected life sentence and high sentence
- 2,724 prisoners arrested from Gaza after October 7.
These are, were, and continue to be the only real hostages, not fucking IDF soldiers or Israelis living and partying in illegal settlements right next to a concentration camp who were captured by the resistance, but the random men, women and children abducted from Palestine by the genocidal Israelis over 75 years of occupation.
(…)Machado’s politics are steeped in violence. She has called for foreign intervention, even appealing directly to Benjamin Netanyahu, the architect of Gaza’s annihilation, to help “liberate” Venezuela with bombs under the banner of “freedom”. She has demanded sanctions, that silent form of warfare whose effects – as studies in The Lancet and other journals have shown – have killed more people than war, cutting off medicine, food, and energy to entire populations.
(…)Every time this award is handed to an architect of violence disguised as diplomacy, it spits in the face of those who actually fight for peace: the Palestinian medics digging bodies from rubble, the journalists risking their lives in Gaza to document the truth and the humanitarian workers of the Flotilla sailing to break the siege and deliver aid to starving children in Gaza, with nothing but courage and conviction.
But real peace is not negotiated in boardrooms or awarded on stages. Real peace is built by women organizing food networks during blockades, by Indigenous communities defending rivers from extraction, by workers who refuse to be starved into obedience, by Venezuelan mothers mobilizing to demand the return of children seized under U.S. ICE and migration policies and by nations that choose sovereignty over servitude. That’s the peace Venezuela, Cuba, Palestine, and every nation of the Global South deserves.
