Watch carefully when you hear and see coverage about this. The people Israel had were "prisoners" while the people hamas had were "hostages."
This kind of subtle reframing of words happens all the time.
CBS Nightly News had a story that talked about the 150% increase (don't quote me on the actual percentage) in antisemitism acts, but anti Muslim sentiments were just "on the rise."
It's a double standard depending on who they're talking about.
The one that I saw was early on, after Hamas attacked, the news reported the number of deaths from “the Hamas invasion”. After that, when Israel retaliated and started killing Palestinians, the news was reporting “the total number killed since the beginning of the Hamas invasion”. They lumped all of the deaths from both sides together and framed it as if they were all attributed to Hamas, even though Israel had killed several times as many people by that point.
Also note that holding hostages is an international war crime, while keeping prisoners is not. I've regularly noticed this language choice on NPR (a public radio station in the US).
Ohh yeah. Media lives to throw details into the bin in order to drive a narrative. I think it would take a soldier familiar with the rules on prisoners of war digging for information to realize that Hamas really tried to abide by those rules for their "hostages". It is however still a very decentralized organization and they can't enforce such things as well as a professional military.