[Pnews] Number of Palestinian children in Israeli prisons soars

[Prisoner News]

*https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/charlotte-silver/number-palestinian-children-israeli-prisons-soars* 



  Number of Palestinian children in Israeli prisons soars

Charlotte Silver 
<https://electronicintifada.net/people/charlotte-silver> 26 April 2016

Israel has sunk to new lows this year: arresting and imprisoning its 
youngest female detainee, 12-year-old Dima al-Wawi, and sentencing her 
to nearly five months in prison.

Dima was arrested in February after she allegedly approached the 
settlement of Karmei Tzur in the southern occupied West Bank with a 
knife. All of Israel’s settlements are illegal under international law.

She has said her intention was to stab a security guard 
<http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/25/world/middleeast/israel-frees-palestinian-girl-12-who-tried-to-stab-guard.html>, 
but the incident resulted in no injuries.

Israel released Dima on Sunday, after she served half her sentence, 
following a successful appeal of her detention by her family on the 
grounds that Israeli law prohibits incarcerating children under 14.

But Israel has also reached grim new highs this year, incarcerating a 
much greater number of Palestinian children between the ages of 12 and 
15, making Dima’s imprisonment disturbing not so much for its novelty 
but for how routine it is.

At the end of December 2015, 116 Palestinian children between 12 and 15 
years old were held in Israeli military detention, an eleven-fold 
increase from the previous year.

In total, 440 children under 18 
<http://nwttac.dci-palestine.org/data_military_detention> are currently 
held in military detention, which is the highest number since the 
Israeli army began sharing data in 2008, and almost two-and-half times 
the number imprisoned a year ago.

According to Defense for Children International–Palestine (DCIP) 
<https://electronicintifada.net/tags/defence-children-international-palestine-section>, 
no other country in the world systematically prosecutes hundreds of 
children in military courts each year.

DCIP thoroughly documents the alarming trends in Israel’s incarceration 
of children in a new report, No Way to Treat a Child 
<https://d3n8a8pro7vhmx.cloudfront.net/dcipalestine/pages/1525/attachments/original/1460402210/DCIP_NWTTAC_Report_Final_April_2016.pdf>, 
which details the extent to which Israel has degraded the rights of 
children living under its military rule.

The researchers collected 429 sworn testimonies between January 2012 and 
December 2015.

The report reveals that in 97 percent of the cases, no parent or lawyer 
was present during interrogation and in 88 percent of the cases the 
children were not informed of the reason for their arrest.


    Shackles

Following harsh censure in 2013 for its treatment of Palestinian 
children in military courts by the UN children’s fund, UNICEF 
<https://electronicintifada.net/tags/unicef>, and the UN Committee on 
the Rights of the Child 
<https://electronicintifada.net/tags/un-convention-rights-child>, Israel 
made several attempts 
<https://electronicintifada.net/content/palestinian-child-faces-10-years-israeli-jail/14707> 
to publicly reform the image of how it treats Palestinian children.

Israel amended its military orders to prohibit night arrests 
<https://electronicintifada.net/tags/night-raids> of minors, 
blindfolding and restraining children with shackles and handcuffs.

But as DCIP documents, those practices are still widely used.

Moreover, in November 2015, Israel’s parliament, the Knesset, amended 
the Youth Law to institute mandatory minimum sentences for children 
alleged to be involved in throwing stones, and increased maximum 
sentences for children who throw stones at a moving vehicle.

“Under the military legal framework,” the report states, “any soldier or 
police officer is authorized to arrest persons without a warrant, even 
children, where they have a suspicion that the individual has committed 
an act violating one of the ‘security offenses’ in Israeli military law.”

“Most children are arrested on suspicion, without arrest warrants. There 
is little to no independent oversight over arrests,” the report adds.

Meanwhile, according to DCIP, Israel maintains that it is not obliged to 
extend international human rights law, including protections outlined in 
the Convention on the Rights of the Child, to Palestinians living in the 
occupied West Bank – arguments that have been rejected by the 
International Court of Justice and several UN human rights treaty bodies.

Dima’s case is emblematic of many of the abuses documented by DCIP. She 
was interrogated without her parents or a lawyer and attended her court 
sessions with her feet in shackles.

She was also sentenced after accepting a plea bargain 
<http://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium-1.716083>, confessing to 
attempted voluntary manslaughter and illegal possession of a knife. More 
than 99 percent of DCIP’s cases ended with plea deals.

At her homecoming from prison on Sunday, Dima said that her one respite 
during her two-and-a-half-month ordeal was that she was allowed to play 
with other incarcerated girls 
<http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/25/world/middleeast/israel-frees-palestinian-girl-12-who-tried-to-stab-guard.html>.

But this is telling of a concerning trend: though still a minority, the 
number of young Palestinian girls in Israeli prison has reached new 
heights <http://nwttac.dci-palestine.org/data_military_detention> – 
there were 12 as of February.


    Coerced confessions

“As the number of arrests of children has grown amid the escalation of 
violence in recent months, so has the number of cases in which 
international norms protecting children are violated,” Human Rights 
Watch <https://electronicintifada.net/tags/human-rights-watch> states in 
its recent report 
<https://www.hrw.org/news/2016/04/11/palestine-israeli-police-abusing-detained-children> 
on the abuse of detained Palestinian children.

The DCIP and Human Rights Watch reports demonstrate that within the 
Israeli military system, Palestinians’ status as children yields to 
their presumed criminal status, justifying the denial of a host of 
protections that should apply to minors according to international norms 
and sometimes even Israeli law.

The systematic abuse of children, from arresting them in the middle of 
the night, to keeping them from their parents, to inflicting physical 
abuse, is aimed at coercing confessions.

Seventeen-year-old Bashir, who was summoned for questioning, told DCIP, 
“[The Israeli interrogation officer] kicked me twice on my legs, punched 
me twice in the stomach and three times on the head, while shouting, 
‘You better confess because I won’t stop beating you unless you confess.’”

DCIP records that 27.5 percent of children experienced some form of 
physical violence during interrogation.

“The main philosophy of interrogation is to exert as much pressure on 
the person under interrogation and keep his resistance as low as 
possible,” Ayed Abu Eqtaish, the accountability program director at DCIP 
states in /Detaining Dreams/, a new short documentary 
<http://nwttac.dci-palestine.org/video_detaining_dreams>, above, 
produced by the organization.

DCIP writes, “Interrogation sessions serve as the primary means of 
securing evidence against children.”

The documentary interviews four teenagers who were arrested in the 
spring of 2014 and severely beaten during their arrests and subsequent 
interrogations.

Abed, who was 14 at the time of his arrest, recalls that he was chained 
to a wall with his feet barely touching the ground, as the soldiers 
delivered blows to his body: “It reached a point where all I felt was pain.”


    System of control

DCIP emphasizes that “cosmetic” changes to Israeli military law cannot 
adequately address the mistreatment of children in the military court 
system because “the system serves control interests of the occupation,” 
rather than the interests of administering justice.

“The Israeli military’s resistance to implementing a summons process for 
Palestinian minors, or other practical changes to address violence and 
abuse, suggest an inherent conflict within the military court system 
between seeking justice and legitimizing control of the Palestinian 
population living under military occupation.”

-- 
Freedom Archives 522 Valencia Street San Francisco, CA 94110 415 
863.9977 www.freedomarchives.org
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