Report: Detained Palestinian Children Face Staggering Rate of Violence Growing up Palestinian in the Israel-occupied West Bank means facing brutality, night arrests, and solitary confinement - Sarah Lazare, staff writer
Israeli occupation forces detain a Palestinian youth in the West Bank city of Hebron on 22 September 2013, during protests against road closures for the benefit of Jewish settlers. (Photo: Mamoun Wazwaz / APA images)
Palestinian children detained in 2013 by Israeli military forces faced violence in the hands of their captors at shocking rates, a new report finds.
Three out of four Palestinian children detained by the Israeli military in the West Bank last year were forced to endure physical violence during their arrests and interrogations, reveals the Defense for Children International-Palestine in a study released Thursday
Furthermore, night arrests jumped to 56.1 percent from 45.2 in 2012, according to 98 affidavits by children between the ages of 12 and 17 that were analyzed by DCI-Palestine. Israeli forces held children in solitary confinement for an average of ten days in 21.4 percent of all cases.
DCI-Palestine's findings follow a year-end review by the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel highlighting reports of widespread torture of Palestinian prisoners, many of them children, including placing prisoners in outdoor cages during winter.
The only thing imprisonment of children will accomplish is to make them lifelong objectives to the plight of the Palestinian people. Basically it will strengthen and harden their resolve to make them into hardline adults that you have to kill to make them stop.
Maybe that is the final objective the Israelis are striving for all along. M-