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class="header"> <b><small><small><a
href="https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/charlotte-silver/number-palestinian-children-israeli-prisons-soars"
id="reader-domain" class="domain"><a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/charlotte-silver/number-palestinian-children-israeli-prisons-soars">https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/charlotte-silver/number-palestinian-children-israeli-prisons-soars</a></a></small></small></b>
<h1 id="reader-title">Number of Palestinian children in Israeli
prisons soars</h1>
<p class="node__submitted">
<span class="field field-author"><a
href="https://electronicintifada.net/people/charlotte-silver"
typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel"
datatype="">Charlotte Silver</a></span> <span class="field
field-blog"></span>
<span class="field field-publication-date"><span
class="date-display-single" property="dc:date"
datatype="xsd:dateTime"
content="2016-04-26T22:35:58+00:00">26 April 2016</span></span>
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<figure class="file file-image file-image-jpeg
media-element file-figure" id="file-36861"><source
media="(min-width: 72rem)">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.</figure>
<p>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.</p>
<p>She has said her <a
href="http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/25/world/middleeast/israel-frees-palestinian-girl-12-who-tried-to-stab-guard.html">intention
was to stab a security guard</a>, but the incident
resulted in no injuries.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>In total, <a
href="http://nwttac.dci-palestine.org/data_military_detention">440
children under 18</a> 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.</p>
<p>According to <a
href="https://electronicintifada.net/tags/defence-children-international-palestine-section">Defense
for Children International–Palestine (DCIP)</a>, no
other country in the world systematically prosecutes
hundreds of children in military courts each year.</p>
<p>DCIP thoroughly documents the alarming trends in
Israel’s incarceration of children in a new report, <a
href="https://d3n8a8pro7vhmx.cloudfront.net/dcipalestine/pages/1525/attachments/original/1460402210/DCIP_NWTTAC_Report_Final_April_2016.pdf">No
Way to Treat a Child</a>, which details the extent to
which Israel has degraded the rights of children living
under its military rule.</p>
<p>The researchers collected 429 sworn testimonies between
January 2012 and December 2015.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<h2>Shackles</h2>
<p>Following harsh censure in 2013 for its treatment of
Palestinian children in military courts by the UN
children’s fund, <a
href="https://electronicintifada.net/tags/unicef">UNICEF</a>,
and the <a
href="https://electronicintifada.net/tags/un-convention-rights-child">UN
Committee on the Rights of the Child</a>, Israel made
<a
href="https://electronicintifada.net/content/palestinian-child-faces-10-years-israeli-jail/14707">several
attempts</a> to publicly reform the image of how it
treats Palestinian children.</p>
<p>Israel amended its military orders to prohibit <a
href="https://electronicintifada.net/tags/night-raids">night
arrests</a> of minors, blindfolding and restraining
children with shackles and handcuffs.</p>
<p>But as DCIP documents, those practices are still widely
used.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>“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.”</p>
<p>“Most children are arrested on suspicion, without
arrest warrants. There is little to no independent
oversight over arrests,” the report adds.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>She was also sentenced after <a
href="http://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium-1.716083">accepting
a plea bargain</a>, confessing to attempted voluntary
manslaughter and illegal possession of a knife. More
than 99 percent of DCIP’s cases ended with plea deals.</p>
<p>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 <a
href="http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/25/world/middleeast/israel-frees-palestinian-girl-12-who-tried-to-stab-guard.html">other
incarcerated girls</a>.</p>
<p>But this is telling of a concerning trend: though still
a minority, the number of young Palestinian girls in
Israeli prison has reached <a
href="http://nwttac.dci-palestine.org/data_military_detention">new
heights</a> – there were 12 as of February.</p>
<h2>Coerced confessions</h2>
<p>“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,” <a
href="https://electronicintifada.net/tags/human-rights-watch">Human
Rights Watch</a> states in its <a
href="https://www.hrw.org/news/2016/04/11/palestine-israeli-police-abusing-detained-children">recent
report</a> on the abuse of detained Palestinian
children.
</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.’”</p>
<p>DCIP records that 27.5 percent of children experienced
some form of physical violence during interrogation.</p>
<p>“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 <em>Detaining
Dreams</em>, a <a
href="http://nwttac.dci-palestine.org/video_detaining_dreams">new
short documentary</a>, above, produced by the
organization.</p>
<p>DCIP writes, “Interrogation sessions serve as the
primary means of securing evidence against children.”</p>
<p>The documentary interviews four teenagers who were
arrested in the spring of 2014 and severely beaten
during their arrests and subsequent interrogations.</p>
<p>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.”</p>
<h2>System of control</h2>
<p>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.</p>
<p>“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.”</p>
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