Reason Israel is running scared of Palestinian youth

GULF NEWS – Palestinian children pay a heavy price during every uprising or flare-up that erupts against the Israeli occupation, although they do not pose any real threat to the heavily armed Israeli soldiers. Many knowledgeable Israelis attest to the fact that Palestinian children are, like adults, subjected to torture, unjust trials (denied special courts) and inhumane treatment that violate their basic rights, with complete disregard to their age. Indeed, the Palestinian child in Israel’s view is a ‘terrorist in the making’. Thus they face military courts and harsh and degrading treatment, beatings, sleep deprivation, threats, sexual harassment and denial of visits by relatives.

The Defence for Children International (DCI) affirms that the Israeli occupation and its interrogators have adopted methods that violate the Convention on the Rights of the Child in dealing with detained Palestinian children. According to the organisation, “the occupation authorities resort to solitary confinement during the investigation (sometimes up to 20 days) with the aim of influencing the children psychologically, within a systematic policy aimed at devastating them while extracting confessions by pressure and coercion”. DCI notes that “the military occupation courts also rely on those confessions extracted by interrogators by force to make judgements, regardless of the way they are extracted, including the threat of arresting their parents, long-term imprisonment, the threat of death, beatings or torture”. In another report, DCI said that the occupation army “killed 2000 Palestinian children since the outbreak of the second intifada in September 2000, where no Israeli soldier was held accountable for that”. The report adds: “The Israeli occupation authorities have arrested more than 14,000 Palestinian children since the second intifada, and 350 of them are still in the prisons, including eight minor girls.”