[Ppnews] Palestinian children 'abused' in Israeli jail

[Political Prisoner News]

    *Palestinian children 'abused' in Israeli jail *

Recent studies allege a system of abuse targeting children detained by 
Israel's military court system.
Dalia Hatuqa <http://www.aljazeera.com/profile/dalia-hatuqa.html> Last 
Modified: 14 Aug 2012 16:38
http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2012/08/20128910267627456.html

*
Ramallah, occupied Palestinian territories -* A dirty mattress fills up 
a space barely two metres long and one metre wide. A suffocating stench 
emanating from the toilet hovers over the windowless room, and a light 
turned on 24/7 means sleep is a distant dream. This is the infamous Cell 
36 in Al Jalameh Prison in Israel. It's one of the cells that many 
Palestinian children have either heard of or, worse, been inside when 
placed in solitary confinement.

The children imprisoned here are most often taken from their homes 
between midnight and 5am. Most don't even see it coming. In one case, in 
Beit Ummar near Bethlehem, Israeli soldiers detained a Palestinian boy 
after reportedly taking some of the house's doors off their hinges. Most 
of the children detained live close to "friction points", areas close to 
Israeli settlements, roads used by settlers or near the separation wall. 
And their offence is almost always throwing stones at settlers or troops.

These vivid details emerged recently in a report based on the 
testimonies of more than 300 Palestinian children, which were collected 
over four years. The study by Defence for Children International, 
/Bound, Blindfolded and Convicted: Children Held in Military Detention/ 
<http://www.dci-palestine.org/sites/default/files/report_0.pdf> 
highlights a pattern of abuse towards children detained under the 
Israeli military court system. In the past 11 years, DCI estimates that 
around 7,500 children, some as young as 12, have been detained, 
interrogated and imprisoned within this system. This is about 500-700 
children per year, or nearly two children every day.

Mohammad S, from the northern West Bank town of Tulkarem, was 16 when he 
was arrested, according to the report. It was 2:30am when Israeli 
soldiers dragged him out of bed. He was blindfolded and verbally abused 
and taken to an unknown destination, where he says he was forced to lay 
down in the cold for an hour. He was later taken to an interrogation 
centre near Nablus at around 11am, and only then was he allowed to drink 
some water and use the bathroom, after he underwent a strip search. Tied 
and blindfolded still, he was then taken to Al Jalameh, near Haifa in 
Israel. There he was taken to Cell 36, where he was forced to spend his 
first night sleeping on the floor because there was no mattress or blanket.

Mohammad says he spent 17 days in solitary confinement in Cell 36 and 
Cell 37, interrupted only by interrogations. Mohammad was reportedly 
interrogated for two to three hours every day, while sitting on a low 
seat with his hands tied to the chair.

*The most crucial hours*

"The first 48 hours after a child is taken are the most important 
because that's when the most abuse happens," DCI's lawyer Gerard Horton 
said. Children taken from their homes in the night are blindfolded and 
bound and made to lie face down or up on the floors of military 
vehicles, according to the centre's report.

Very rarely are parents told where their child is being taken, and, 
unlike Israeli children from within either Israel or the settlements in 
the occupied West Bank, Palestinian minors are reportedly not allowed to 
have a parent present before or during initial interrogation, and 
generally do not see a lawyer until after their interrogation is over.

Specifically, Israeli children have access to a lawyer within 48 hours 
and those under the age of 14 cannot be imprisoned. Palestinian 
children, however, can be jailed even if they are as young as 12 and, 
like adults, can be held in jail without having formal charges against 
them for up to 188 days.

"The key issue is one of equality. If two children, a Palestinian and an 
Israeli, are caught throwing stones at each other, then one will be 
processed in a juvenile justice system and one in a military court," 
Horton said.

"They have completely different rights. It's hard to justify this after 
45 years of occupation. It's not a question of whether offences are 
committed. What we are saying is children should not be treated 
completely differently."

As soon as children are taken from their homes, and placed inside an 
Israeli military vehicle, they are often kicked or slapped, according to 
testimonies obtained by DCI. Some said they were laughed at and others 
said they heard cameras clicking.

*Nightmares*

Because children are often taken late at night, they are driven to the 
nearest settlement to wait until Israeli police interrogators open up 
shop in the morning. This means children are sometimes placed out in the 
cold or rain for many hours. Requests for water or using the bathroom 
are most often denied, and children are taken straight to interrogation 
after a night of little sleep.

That's what Ahmad F said happened to him. A 15-year-old from 'Iraq Burin 
village, just outside Nablus, he was arrested in July 2011. He was taken 
to the nearby Huwwara interrogation centre, where he was left outside 
from 5am until 3pm. At one point, soldiers brought a dog. "They brought 
the dog's food and put it on my head," Ahmad told DCI. "Then they put 
another piece of bread on my trousers near my genitals, so I tried to 
move away but [the dog] started barking. I was terrified."

During interrogation, many children reported being facing with slurs and 
threatened with physical violence. In a small number of cases, 
interrogators have reportedly threatened minors with rape.

In 29 per cent of cases studied by DCI, Arabic-speaking children were 
either shown or given documentation written in Hebrew to sign. An 
Israeli spokesperson denied this to Al Jazeera, saying "the norm is that 
interrogations in Arabic should be either recorded or written in 
Arabic". Israeli officials did say, however, they had identified 13 
cases from the report where children had signed a confession written in 
Hebrew. Yet the spokesperson maintained that video recordings of those 
interrogations had been available, should the lawyers acting for the 
children doubt the accuracy of the written Hebrew statements.

After children sign a "confession", they are brought before an Israeli 
military court. Since 2009, an Israeli spokesperson said, children have 
faced juvenile military courts. Most often, that's the first time the 
minor will see their lawyer. The confession is generally the primary 
evidence against the child, say DCI officials. Other evidence will often 
consist of a statement by an interrogator, and sometimes a soldier.

Because so few are granted bail, children face a legal dilemma: they can 
ask the lawyer to challenge the system - and by doing so potentially 
wait, locked up, for four to six months - or plead guilty and get a two 
or three month prison sentence for a "first offence".

*Pleading guilty*

"So, very rarely does anyone challenge the system," said DCI's Horton, 
as the quickest way to be released is to plead guilty. This goes some 
way to explain why, according to the military courts, the conviction 
rate for adults and children in 2010 was 99.74 per cent 
<http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/news/nearly-100-of-all-military-court-cases-in-west-bank-end-in-conviction-haaretz-learns-1.398369>.

According to DCI, some fifty to sixty per cent of the time, children are 
taken to prisons inside Israel, making it difficult for parents to 
visit. "Some parents are denied permits on unspecified 'security 
grounds'. For the others, the bureaucracy can take up to two months to 
get a permit, which means if their children are sentenced to less time, 
they will not receive a visit," Horton said. "However, some permits are 
processed in less than two months, and those children sentenced to more 
time will also generally receive visits."

The allegations of what seems to be a deliberate system of abuse appear 
to be corroborated by another report 
<http://www.childreninmilitarycustody.org/>published by a group of 
British jurists. The UK government-backed delegation of nine lawyers, 
with human rights, crime and child welfare backgrounds, concluded that 
Israel's soldiers regularly breach 
<http://www2.ohchr.org/english/law/crc.htm>the UN Convention on the 
Rights of the Child <http://www2.ohchr.org/english/law/crc.htm> (UNCRC) 
and the Fourth Geneva Convention <http://www.icrc.org/ihl.nsf/full/380>, 
of which Israel is a signatory.

Their report, /Children in Military Custody/ 
<http://www.childreninmilitarycustody.org/>, attributed much of Israel's 
reluctance to treat Palestinian children in accordance with 
international norms to "a belief, which was advanced to us by a military 
prosecutor, that every Palestinian child is a 'potential terrorist'". 
The lawyers said this seemed to be "the starting point of a spiral of 
injustice, and one which only Israel, as the Occupying Power in the West 
Bank, can reverse".

Israel's practice of holding children "for substantial periods in 
solitary confinement would, if it occurred, be capable of amounting to 
torture", the report concluded. Of all the children represented by DCI, 
12 per cent reported being held in solitary confinement for an average 
of 11 days.

*Denial*

The Israel Security Agency (ISA), also known as Shin Bet, denied that 
children were mistreated under the military court system, calling claims 
to the contrary "utterly baseless". The ISA also said that claims 
regarding the prevention of legal counsel were also completely groundless.

"No one questioned, including minors being questioned, is kept alone in 
a cell as a punitive measure or in order to obtain a confession," said 
the ISA in a statement when the /Guardian/ first released a special 
report 
<http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/jun/26/israel-palestinian-children-injustice>about 
the status of child detainees in Israel.

The ISA also said that it provides minors special protection because of 
their age and adheres to "international treaties of which the State of 
Israel is a signatory, and according to Israeli law, including the right 
to legal counsel and visits by the Red Cross".

Speaking to Al Jazeera, an Israeli spokesperson accused the DCI report 
of bias, and refuted the group's finding that the majority of children 
prosecuted were charged with throwing stones: "This was the basis for 
only 40 per cent of the indictments filed against minors in the West 
Bank ... the young age of offenders is not relevant to the gravity of 
the act: it has been proven beyond doubt that a stone thrown by a 
15-year-old child can be no less fatal than a stone thrown by an adult."

Stone-throwing can prove deadly, stressed the spokesperson, citing a 
case from September 2011, when an Israeli settler and his one-year-old 
son were killed after their car overturned as a result of stones hurled 
at them. "Two Palestinians from Halhul confessed to throwing the stone 
which caused the deaths of Asher and Yonatan. The stone was hurled from 
a driving car," the spokesperson said. The official said that children 
were also involved in grenade throwing, the use of explosives, shooting 
and assault

The spokesperson also denied that the ISA used isolation as an 
interrogation technique or as punishment to exert confessions out of 
minors. "There are certain cases in which an interrogee will be held 
alone for a few days at the most, in order to prevent information in 
his/her possession from leaking to other terrorist activists in the same 
detention facility, which could compromise the interrogation of the 
suspect. Note that even in these cases, the interrogee is not held in 
absolute confinement, but is entitled to meet with Red Cross 
representatives, medical staff etc."

Furthermore, the spokesperson rejected the idea that pleading guilty was 
the quickest way out of the system for a defendant, deeming the 
accusation "misleading, distorted, and premised upon incorrect information".

"Should a minor defendant choose to plead 'not guilty' and challenge the 
prosecutorial evidence by proceeding to a full trial and mounting a 
good-faith defence, military courts will, in the vast majority of the 
cases, conduct the hearings very efficiently, sometimes even in a few 
weeks."

Yet, since the DCI and UK reports came out, "there's no substantive 
change on the ground", Horton said. "The response by the military 
authorities has been to start talking about making some changes and 
amending the military orders. But when you look at the details, the 
changes are of little substance."

"In reality, what we are seeing is a /de facto/ annexation of most of 
the West Bank; it's not a temporary military occupation," he concluded. 
"The military courts are an integral part of this process used to 
control the population."

/Follow Dalia Hatuqa on Twitter: @DaliaHatuqa 
<https://twitter.com/DaliaHatuqa>/

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