1 December 2011, Alternative Information Center (AIC) המרכז לאינפורמציה אלטרנטיבית
http://www.alternativenews.org (Israel)
Jana Grunewald for the Alternative Information Center
In September 2009 Israel established the Military Youth Court. Two years later, in September 2011 Israel finally met its obligations under international law and raised the age of majority in the military courts from 16 to 18. However, none of these changes brought major improvements in practice and the abuse of Palestinian children arrested and detained by Israeli authorities continues…
(Scores of Palestinian children are in Israeli prisons/photo: flickr/jpmacor)
Since the beginning of the Second Intifada in September 2000, Israel started to deploy administrative detention orders on children. According to international law, administrative detention is only permitted on a very limited scale, especially in concern of minors. In Israel, however, Palestinian children are being detained systematically ever since. Every year there is an approximately 700 Palestinian children arrested by the Israeli military and prosecuted in its courts.
Currently 164 Palestinian children are kept in Israeli detention, mostly being charged with stone throwing. Although it is forbidden by Israeli law to imprison any human being under the age of 14, 35 of the children detained are aged between 12 and 13. It is alarming that minors are arrested and incarcerated in violation of Israeli and international legislation. What is even more disturbing though is the way children are treated during their arrest, interrogation and detention.
Several NGOs that investigated the treatment of minors in Israeli imprisonment, report on physical as well as mental abuse. In many cases minors are arrested in their home during the night and marched off by soldiers without any parental company. The interrogation as well takes place in the absence of a parent and/or an attorney. In many cases, several hours or even days pass until the arrested minors are interrogated at all. While waiting for the interrogation the children concerned are often denied necessary human needs such as sleeping, eating, drinking and going to the toilet. During all stages of the arrest violence is likely to be involved, including choking, punching, slapping, kicking and hair pulling. In addition to that minors are threatened with further violence and even sexual assault.
Another major problem is the fact that there is no alternative to remand until the end of proceedings according to military law, which is mainly applied on Palestinian child detainees. In consequence many children confess to crimes they supposedly committed in order to prevent longer terms of detention. The confessions, minors are forced to sign, are often written in Hebrew, a language that many Palestinian children cannot read.
About 93% of the children convicted of stone throwing between 2005 and 2010 are sentenced to imprisonment, which shows that there is hardly any alternative punishment to incarceration. The length of detention varies greatly, ranging from a few days up to 20 months. The experiences made in detention harm the children’s development severely. Once they are released, the majority of young ex-detainees suffer from various problems, including social, financial and emotional difficulties.
The mistreatment of Palestinian children in Israel’s courts and prisons is constantly ignored. Even the mere awareness of minors enduring imprisonment is missing, which made a current event very obvious: When in October this year Gilat Shalit was freed in exchange for 1,027 Palestinian prisoners, no one talked about the minors detained; neither did Israel’s authorities nor the international community, nor did Hamas.
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