Monday, July 20, 2015
New Probe Exposes Horrific Child
Abuse by Israeli Forces
Palestinian children face chokeholds, stun grenades, and forced
confessions at the hands of Israeli forces, Human Rights Watch report reveals
Israeli border police arresting Ahmad Abu Sbitan, 11, in front
of his school in East Jerusalem. (Photo: Majd Gaith/HRW)
Israeli forces are choking, beating, and abusing Palestinian
children as young as 11, arresting and coercing them into confessions without
granting them access to lawyers or even informing their parents of their
whereabouts, a new
investigation from Human Rights Watch reveals.
The findings are contained in a report—Israel: Security
Forces Abuse Palestinian Children—based on interviews with
six children between the ages of 11 and 15, and corroborated by witness
testimony and video evidence. All of the children were accused of throwing
rocks between March and December 2014—a common charge that can lead to decades
in prison.
"Israel has been on notice for years that its security
forces are abusing Palestinian children’s rights in occupied territory, but the
problems continue," said Sarah Leah Whitson, Middle East and North Africa
director for HRW. "These are not difficult abuses to end if the Israeli
government were serious about doing so."
In each case, parents were not told their child had been
arrested and the children were not provided lawyers during their
interrogations. Two boys and one girl said they were forced under threat of
beatings to sign confessions that were written in Hebrew, a language they don't
understand.
The families of two children were not permitted to visit or even
call them during their respective incarcerations of 64 and 110 days.
Israeli forces inflicted violence on the children using stun
grenades, chokeholds, and physical beatings. Two children urinated on
themselves throughout the course of the arrest due to fear, and several say
they suffer lasting psychological impacts, including nightmares.
"When they drove me from the settlement to the office, they
put a black cloth bag on my head, and were shouting, 'We’re going to beat you,
you're going to tell us who was with you throwing stones,'" 11-year-old
Rashid from the Silwan neighborhood in East Jerusalem told HRW. "Then they
were pushing me around, and cursing me, in Arabic. They kicked me in the shin,
and my leg turned different colors. I was freezing. They kept putting me into a
car and taking me out."
Most of the children's full names are being withheld in the
report for their protection.
Though the HRW report falls short of calling the atrocities
torture, many organizations—from Defense for
Children International-Palestine to the United Nations—have
extensively documented Israel's systematic torture and mistreatment of Palestinian
children.
The problem is compounded by the large scale of such arrests and
detentions. Palestinian human rights organization Addameer reports that approximately
700 Palestinians under the age of 18 from the occupied West Bank alone are
prosecuted in Israeli military courts every year after being arrested and
detained. The organization estimates that more than 8,000 Palestinian children
have been incarcerated by Israel since 2000.
Whitson emphasized in a statement that Israel's abuse of
Palestinian children is "at odds with its claim to respect children's
rights," and the U.S. shares responsibility for this mistreatment:
"As Israel's largest military donor, the U.S. should press hard for an end
to these abusive practices and for reforms."
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share
Alike 3.0 License
Donations
can be sent to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD
21218. Ph: 410-366-1637; Email: mobuszewski [at] verizon.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
"The master class
has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.
The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject
class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their lives."
Eugene Victor Debs
No comments:
Post a Comment