Ill-treatment and torture of Palestinian children - a report

[tericared]

 

17 June 2009

Defense for Children International — Palestine Section, has issued a report on the abuse and torture of Palestinian child prisoners by Israeli authorities. Jonathan Cook writes about this report in today’s CounterPunch. Here is the DCI/PS description of their report:

Ill-treatment and torture of Palestinian children - a report

RAMALLAH, 11 June 2009 – Today, DCI-Palestine is releasing a report which documents the widespread ill-treatment and torture of Palestinian children at the hands of the Israeli army and police force – Palestinian Child Prisoners: The systematic and institutionalised ill-treatment and torture of Palestinian children by Israeli authorities.

The release of the report comes just days after an article was published in The Independent newspaper reporting the testimonies of two Israeli soldiers which detail the deliberate abuse of Palestinian children. One soldier is reported as saying that in an incident that occurred in a Palestinian village in March, he saw a lot of soldiers ‘just knee (Palestinians) because it’s boring, because you stand there for 10 hours, you’re not doing anything, so they beat people up.’

The report published today contains the testimonies of 33 children, one as young as 10 years old, who bear witness to the abuse they received at the hands of soldiers from the moment of arrest through to an often violent interrogation.

Most of these children were arrested from villages near the Wall and illegal Israeli settlements in the West Bank. There is evidence that many children are painfully shackled for hours on end, kicked, beaten and threatened, some with death, until they provide confessions, some written in Hebrew, a language they do not speak or understand.

A soldier [...] pointed his rifle at me. The rifle barrel was a few centimetres away from my face. I was so terrified that I started to shiver. He made fun of me and said: ‘shivering? Tell me where the pistol is before I shoot you.’
(Ezzat, 10 years old)

http://english.pnn.ps/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=5805