On 16 March 2012, a 13-year-old boy from Fayasel village, in the occupied West Bank, is arrested with two other boys by Israeli soldiers whilst grazing sheep close to a road used by settlers.

Adel and two friends were grazing a flock of sheep one morning near a main road used by settlers. “I threw a stone at the sheep to drive them off the road, but I threw it really hard and it reached the main road just as a settler car was passing,” recalls 13-year-old Adel. Adel says the stone landed a long way from the settler car. “The settler saw us and pulled over. He got out with his wife and children. He was armed. He started shouting at us and ordered us to approach him. We became very scared, so we approached him and he ordered us to sit on the ground while shouting at us,” says Adel. About 10 minutes later, three Israeli army jeeps arrived on the scene. Adel recalls that the soldiers started beating one of the other boys. “Then they tied my hands behind my back with a single plastic tie and blindfolded me.”

The soldiers put the three boys in two jeeps ready for transfer. “They forced us to sit on the metal floor,” recalls Adel. “One of them punched me hard in the stomach and I felt a lot of pain. ‘Why do you throw stones?’ he asked and I explained to him what happened. ‘Liar. Denying it or lying about it won’t do you any good,’ he said.” The jeeps first took the boys to a nearby checkpoint where they were made to sit on the ground. “While we were sitting there, it started raining and it was freezing. They kept us there in the rain and cold weather for about an hour. After that, they took us inside and kept us in a room for about five hours. They kept us tied and blindfolded. There was an Arabic speaking soldier with us, who shouted at us and threatened to beat us. We kept sitting there until around 2:00 pm,” recalls Adel.

At around 2:00 pm the boys were transferred to Ari’el settlement for interrogation. Adel tried to explain to the interrogator what had happened, but he was not believed. Adel’s interrogation lasted for approximately one-and-a-half hours. He was not given access to a lawyer and neither of his parents were present during his questioning – a right granted to Israeli children. At around midnight the boys were transferred to Megiddo prison, inside Israel, in violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention which prohibits transfer out of occupied territory. They arrived at the prison at 3:00 am and were untied for the first time in 19 hours. The boys were strip searched and then taken to the juvenile section of the prison.

For further information see: Website: DCI-Palestine

Talliq is van mening dat Palestijnse kinderen helemaal niet in een cel gezet moeten worden, maar zeker niet in een isoleercel.

Als je deze brief wilt ondertekenen stuur dan een e-mail met je naam en de plaats waar je woont naar: eajg@eajg.nl

Doe het nu want de termijn sluit op 27 april.

On 11 March at around 1:45 am, Israeli soldiers entered ‘Anan’s home in the village of al-Nabi Saleh. The soldiers rounded up his family in their living room and searched the house.(Read more)

According to the study released by Save the Children Sweden and YMCA-East Jerusalem on Monday, 90.6 percent of detained children suffer Post Traumatic Stress Disorder after release.

Released minors often are unable to return to school, experience bed-wetting, anxiety attacks and nightmares, the report says. Families and communities suffer from stigmatization, and become increasingly conservative as fear grows of further detentions, it adds.

“Detention is especially stressful for a child, their coping mechanism is not developed yet,” Save the Children’s Kete Shabani said at the report launch in Ramallah. Last year, the youngest child seized by Israel forces was seven years old, and around 700 children are detained every year, she added. Read more

To read a fact sheet summarising the results of the findings, click here

RAMALLAH, (PIC)– The international organization for the defense of children has said that the Israeli occupation soldiers savagely beat up a Palestinian child after breaking both his legs.

The organization quoted the 16-year-old boy Mahmoud Qatna as saying that he was heading to an area near the separation wall in his village Beit Sorik along with a number of his friends when the soldiers surprised them.

He said that the soldiers arrested him along with two of his friends, threw him on his stomach on the ground and started beating him savagely, adding that before that he was hit with a rubber bullet in his left leg fired by those soldiers. Read more

Amid the humanitarian crises facing the people of the Gaza strip there exists a less well known or talked about crisis, that of mental health. Israel’s tightening of the illegal closure of Gaza in 2006, and its 2008-2009 offensive, has meant that, for Gaza’s 1.7 million civilians, reality is a mix of isolation and violence. This mixture has contributed to a sense of vulnerability, hopelessness, imprisonment and loss of control amongst Gaza’s residents.

Mental health outcomes have, predictably, dramatically worsened over the last number of years. Medicine San Frontiers stated in 2010 that over half of children under the age of 12 in Gaza were in need of mental health intervention, and that one third of these cases are severe. According to Husam El Nounou, Public Relations Director at the Gaza Community Mental Health Programme, the overwhelming cause of the worsening mental health situation is the political and human rights circumstances facing Gaza’s population, specifically the closure of Gaza and continuing Israeli attacks. Read more

OCCUPIED JERUSALEM, (PIC)– A large number of Israeli special forces broke into the home of a Palestinian family in Aisawiye village in occupied Jerusalem and arrested a 13-year-old minor.
Local sources said that the family members were surprised with the big number who came to arrest a child and that the father tried to prevent them and told them he would bring his child to the police station but they refused.
They said that the forces brutally pushed the father who fell on his two-year-old child then took him outside the house at gunpoint and beat him up.
The sources said that the forces even beat the wife and her daughter Rula, 15, her son Qusay, 11, before taking away her other son Uday, 13.

Message from The voice of Palestine

Euro-Mid Observer for Human Rights commented on a number of facts about the violations committed by the Israeli authorities against Palestinian “minors” being detained and extracting confessions under pressure, in Israeli police stations

Euro-Mid Observer for Human Rights (Euro-Mid Observer) commented on a leaked video showing Israeli interrogators grabbing confessions from a Palestinian minor by imposing physical and psychological pressure on the minor. An official in the Euro-Mid observer stated that the Euro-mid observer collected and documented testimonies of a number of Palestinian minors, who have undergone cruel and inhumane methods of investigations after being arrested in the areas of West Bank and Jerusalem. Read more

A new line was crossed by the Israeli occupying forces in East Jerusalem this week when they harassed, blindfolded and detained a six-year-old boy, with a serious illness, for seven hours. The arbitrary detention of children is a common feature of Israel’s regime in the occupied Palestinian territory; hundreds of incidents similar to those described below were documented in 2011.

On 3 January at around 4:00 pm, Israeli forces arrested and blindfolded six-year-old Muhammad as he was walking back from his dentist’s office to his home in al-‘Isawiya (Jerusalem governorate).

According to an eye-witness, who wished to remain unidentified for fear of recriminations from Israeli soldiers, three members of the Israeli Special Forces, hiding behind Muhammad’s house, ran towards Muhammad when he arrived home. They tripped him, grabbed him by the arm and forced him inside a car, which then drove to an unknown location. Read more