By Whitney Webb
JERUSALEM – According to figures released
by the Prisoners’ and Freed Prisoners’ Committee of the Palestine Liberation
Organization (PLO) on Sunday, the state of Israel has imprisoned more than
50,000 children since the occupation of Palestine’s West Bank began in 1967. The PLO
report, which was cited by Middle East Monitor, also noted that
around 17,000 of those child arrests had occurred since the year 2000. The
report used the UN definition that states that a child is any person younger
than 18 years of age. However, Israel’s government has defined children younger than 16
as children, while applying the UN definition to Israeli children.
The PLO report – titled “Child
Detention… Facts and Statistics… Effects on the Reality and Future of
Palestinian Childhood” – was made public as the head of the PLO Prisoner
committee, Abdul Nasser Ferwaneh, gave testimony to the 5th European Union
conference in support of prisoners. In delivering his report and testimony,
Ferwaneh noted that the rate of child imprisonment by the Israeli state had
nearly doubled, averaging around 700 children imprisoned annually from 2000 to
2010 but rising to around 1,250 between 2011 and 2018.
Defense for Children
International Palestine (DCIP), citing data from the Israeli Prison Service
(IPS) and Israeli army temporary detention facilities, recently
reported that 414 Palestinian children were imprisoned by Israeli military
courts in just the first two months of 2019.
An apartheid system with
kangaroo courts
Since 1967, Palestinian
children have been subjected to Israeli military law
while Israeli settlers living in illegal West Bank settlements are governed by
Israel’s civilian criminal legal system. Aside from the fact that subjecting
two different populaces in the same area to two different legal systems is a
clear manifestation of apartheid, Israel is the only country in the world that
automatically tries children in military courts, courts that lack basic fair
trial guarantees and have a near-automatic conviction rate. In addition, many
Palestinian children are arbitrarily
detained, or imprisoned without charge.
Most Palestinian children
tried in military court are accused of throwing stones – which, as of 2015, can
carry a maximum
sentence of 20 years in prison. No Israeli child has ever been tried in an
Israeli military court.
Children in detention in
Israeli jails are often subjected to various forms of abuse, including
“slapping, beating, kicking and violent pushing” as well as verbal abuse, according to prisoner-rights group
Adameer. Adameer has also noted that Palestinian children are
sometimes threatened with rape in order to extract confessions, which are often
written in Hebrew – a language most Palestinian children can’t read or
understand.
Obaida Akram Jawabra, a
15-year-old who has already been arrested twice by Israel, told
DCIP that in prison “[Israeli] soldiers would beat me in places that would leave
no marks so there wouldn’t be evidence on my body that I could use to testify
against them.” Figures released by DCIP claim that 75
percent of Palestinian child prisoners report being subjected to physical
violence while in prison and 62 percent report being subjected to verbal violence.
The majority of Palestinian
children in detention are unable to receive family visits, since nearly 60 percent of all child detainees are
transferred from the West Bank to Israeli prisons upon conviction. This
practice, which violates the Fourth Geneva Convention – coupled with
restrictions on Palestinians’ freedom of movement in the West Bank and the long
delays in issuing permits for entry to Israel – prevents the vast majority of
West Bank Palestinian families from visiting their imprisoned children.
While Israel’s government
often touts itself as the “only democracy” in the Middle East, it is also the
only government in the entire world that detains children through military
courts with a near 100 percent conviction rate, something that even Saudi
Arabia does not do. Israel’s practice of imprisoning Palestinian children is a
clear violation of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, ratified by
Israel in 1991, as it routinely robs thousands of children of their right to a
safe childhood.
Feature Photo | Israeli police
place a Palestinian boy in a chokehold in Jerusalem’s Old City, July 17, 2017.
Mahmoud Illean | AP
Whitney Webb is a MintPress News journalist
based in Chile. She has contributed to several independent media outlets
including Global Research, EcoWatch, the Ron Paul Institute and 21st Century
Wire, among others. She has made several radio and television appearances and
is the 2019 winner of the Serena Shim Award for Uncompromised Integrity in
Journalism.
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