The Guardian backtracks on arrest statistic in Palestinian prisoner release story

The Guardian has corrected its reporting on the mass release of Palestinian prisoners, clarifying that the figure cited referred specifically to men — not to the entire Palestinian population.

In its October 13 article covering the release of nearly 2,000 detainees from Israeli prisons, the newspaper originally claimed that “up to 40% of Palestinians have been arrested at some point.” The amendment issued the following day clarified that this statistic applied only to Palestinian males, a significant distinction given the demographic and political sensitivity surrounding incarceration rates in the occupied territories.

The article, which vividly described scenes of jubilation and grief as long-detained prisoners returned home to the West Bank and Gaza, drew attention to allegations of mistreatment in Israeli prisons and to the broader human toll of the conflict. But the statistical misstatement inflated the scale of Palestinian imprisonment, implying that almost half of the total population — including women and children — had been detained.

That framing risked misleading readers about the extent of Israel’s detention practices and amplifying perceptions of systemic repression beyond what data currently supports. While the correction was swiftly issued, the original claim had already circulated widely on social media, reinforcing an exaggerated narrative that could further inflame public sentiment in an already volatile discourse.