Palestinian children being terrorized and victimized

Jan 13, 2024 Letters

Dear Editor,

Writing in the Daily Nation (Barbados) (28 November 2023) Itai Bardov, Ambassador of Israel, attempts to depict Palestinian children as terrorists and whitewash the inhumane way Israel treats hundreds of Palestinians children, some as young as nine, in their custody in what is a violation of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child.

According to rights group, Save the Children (report from July 2023), 86 percent of Palestinian children in Israeli custody are beaten, 69 percent are strip-searched, and 42 percent are injured during their arrests (suffering gunshot wounds and broken bones among other injuries). Some children report violence of a sexual nature, and some are transferred to court or between detention centres in small cages.

Israel operates two separate legal systems: one for Palestinians and one for Israeli settlers. Palestinian children are the only children in the world prosecuted through military courts, whereas Israeli children live under civilian and criminal law. Save the Children estimates 10,000 children have been held in the Israeli military detention system over the past 20 years. Israeli prison conditions for Palestinian children are inhumane. Seventy-five percent of Palestinian children in Israeli prisons are physically beaten and more than half are threatened with harm to their families. Israeli authorities also routinely detain Palestinian children in isolation solely for interrogation purposes, which amounts to torture.

To elaborate the inhumane and unfair way in which Palestinian children are treated in Israeli custody, take the example of Dima Ismail Rashid al-Wawi (born in 2003) from Halhul in the West Bank. In 2016, aged 12, Dima was “arrested” by an armed, illegal settler who claimed she was trying to stab him. Dima had gone out looking for her mother in the family field, got lost and was attacked by an armed settler who “arrested” her.

Dima was blindfolded and, in a statement given afterwards, said, “I was crying really hard, but no one could hear me. Later, a group of Israeli soldiers arrived and threw me into the back of an army vehicle…they accused me of trying to stab a settler. It is a complete lie. The settler made that up to justify the way he treated me.” Separated from her family, Dima was taken to prison and interrogated. Despite her protests that she had done nothing, she was eventually tried in front of a military court where proceedings were carried out in Hebrew, a language she did not understand.

In her statement given after her release, Dima said, “They yelled and swore at me all the time. All I knew was that I was in prison for something I did not do.” She was sentenced to four and a half months and served her time with adult prisoners (see Ramzy Baroud’s “These Chains Will be Broken: Palestinian Stories of Struggle and Defiance in Israeli Prisons”).

From 2006 to 2022, some 1,165 Palestinian children were killed by Israel in Gaza alone and, in this latest bout of violence; Israel has murdered over 5,500 children. Using lethal force is a violation of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, something that Israel is a signatory of. However, Israel continues to steal Palestinian childhood, something that it has been doing since 1948.

Email: dmcddenny@gmail.com

Yours together,

David Denny

General Secretary

Caribbean Movement for Peace and Integration

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Caribbean Movement for Peace and Integration, David Denny, General Secretary, terrorized, victimized

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