The different treatment accorded to the plights of Palestinian and Israeli prisoners by US corporate media illustrates a persistent double standard that regards some people as more human than others.

Take twenty-year-old Palestinian prisoner Ahmed Saeed Tazaz’a, who died in Israel’s Megiddo Prison after nearly three months of illegal detention, according to the Commission of Detainees and Ex-Detainees Affairs (CDA), an agency of the Palestinian Authority.

Tazaz’a, who was from Jenin in the northern occupied West Bank, was imprisoned on May 6 of this year without a charge or a trial. He was held under Israel’s policy of “administrative detention,” which locks up Palestinians indefinitely “on the grounds that he or she plans to break the law in the future,” according to the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem. Tazaz’a did not suffer from prior health problems before his arrest, according to his family.