Hamas is demanding the release of all women and children imprisoned in Israel, as ransom for their hostage Corporal Gilad Shalit. As we demonstrated Wednesday, Western media is obviously sympathetic to this demand—in the case of the BBC, so sympathetic that they will even conceal important information about Palestinian prisoners.

But in a Globe and Mail report (ignored by the rest of the media), we discover that there are very good reasons why these people are in jail: Palestinian female prisoners have ‘blood on their hands’.

JERUSALEM — Ahlam Tamimi was sentenced by an Israeli military court to 16 life sentences: one for each person killed in an attack on a restaurant in August of 2001. Ms. Tamimi brought the bomb in a guitar case to a suicide bomber who blew himself up in the Sbarro restaurant in Jerusalem. Sixteen people were killed in the attack, including five members of the same family.

Ms. Tamimi is one of 109 Palestinian women and 313 Palestinian children under the age of 18 who are sitting in Israeli prisons as security prisoners, the Israeli prison authority said yesterday.

Palestinian militants from the military wings of the Popular Resistance Committees and Hamas yesterday demanded the prisoners’ release in exchange for an Israeli soldier they abducted Sunday.

The women are accused of acts such as planning suicide bombings, aiding suicide bombers, preparing suicide-bomb belts, attacking Israeli soldiers with knives and being members of a terrorist organization.

“Sixty-four of the women and 91 of the youth have blood on their hands,” prison authority spokeswoman Orit Stelster said.

While Hamas is the most infamous Palestinian organization, known for its attacks on civilians and its unwillingness to recognize Israel, most of the Palestinian women in Israeli jails are from Fatah, an organization that recognizes Israel’s right to exist, to which Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas belongs and with which Israel is willing to negotiate.

“About 35 per cent of [the women prisoners] are from Fatah, about 20 per cent are from the Islamic Jihad and about 20 per cent are from Hamas,” Ms. Stelster said. “The rest are from smaller terrorist groups.”

Palestinian children in Israeli jails are boys ranging in age from 13 to 18. Most of them were jailed for carrying knives at Israeli military checkpoints or throwing Molotov cocktails at Israeli military jeeps in the West Bank.

Recently it was revealed that boys are deliberately trying to get arrested by Israeli forces by carrying knives or simple bombs. The youths are poor and living under great duress, some in cities such as Nablus that are under siege for extended periods.