Edition 2: No. 31
Brutal treatment of Palestinian child prisoners by Israel
An important report published by a group of British lawyers, funded by the British Foreign Office, has highlighted the inhumane treatment of Palestinian child prisoners byIsrael.
In the report’s damning conclusion, the lawyers stated that the reluctance to treat Palestinian child prisoners in accordance with international law may stem from the Israeli view that every Palestinian child is a ‘potential terrorist’ which leads to a ‘spiral of injustice’.
It shows how Israeli settlers and Palestinians are subject to different laws, so a Palestinian child can be held for up to 90 days without access to a lawyer and for 188 days without charge, whereas an Israeli child could only be held for two and 40 days respectively. When arrested, Palestinian children are not informed of their right to silence or a lawyer and are routinely held in solitary confinement. At present, 192 Palestinian children are imprisoned in Israeli jails, 39 of these are under the age of 16.
A full report can be found at:
For a wide variety of resources on children’s rights inPalestine, visit:
Defence for Children International-Palestine Section (DCI-Palestine) is a national section of the international non-governmental child rights organisation and movement, Defence for Children International (DCI), established in 1979. DCI-Palestine develops its own programmes according to Palestinian children’s needs and priorities and follows the broad mandate of promoting and protecting the rights of children according to international standards.
A key component of DCI -Palestine’s work is to provide legal assistance to children detained under the Israeli occupation and to compile accurate statistics on the number of children detained at any one time.
DCI-Palestine has documented cases involving Palestinian children being used as human shields by the Israeli army. Most of these cases have occurred after the Israeli High Court of Justice ruled the practice to be illegal in October 2005.
DCI-Palestine has also monitored the number of children injured or killed in settler violence attacks. There have been over a hundred such known cases since 2008 alone.
Palestine has followed through on the case of each Palestinian child killed as a result of Israeli military and settler presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territories.
For detailed statistics see:
http://www.dci-palestine.org/content/statistics
In solidarity,
Ranjan Solomon