At the mercy of heartless occupiers
More than 500 Palestinian children face physical and verbal abuse at the hands of the Israeli army every year
- By Aya Lowe, Special to Weekend Review
- Published: 21:30 October 3, 2013
Ehab Yasser Mohammad was only 15 when about 30 Israeli soldiers arrived
at his house in the refugee camp Al Arrub to arrest him for something
he did not do.
According to his father, Yasser Abu Ehab, they banged on their door at
about 3am. After several minutes of banging, the father answered the
door just as they were getting ready to throw an explosive to open it.
“When I asked what they were doing knocking down the door at 3am, the
soldiers responded by saying, ‘You can’t ask the Israeli army what we
are doing. You are under occupation and we can do whatever we want,’”
Abu Ehab said.
Abu Ehab was asked to gather all the children in the living room. “When
Bashar (his 12-year-old son) saw the soldiers, he wetted himself. It
was a terrifying experience for the children,” he said. The soldiers
asked for Yasser Mohammad, his oldest son. Completely unaware of what
was happening or what he was accused of, Yasser Mohammad was handcuffed
and put into a military vehicle, where he was kicked and punched, before
being delivered to an interrogator.
“While I was in the jeep they beat my head against the jeep and beat me
with the butt of their gun. While they were beating me they were
talking and singing,” Yasser Mohammad recalled.
“I heard the screaming of my child. It was heartbreaking,” Abu Ehab added, lowering his tone at the painful memory.
Yasser Mohammad was taken to a detention centre where the interrogator
told him to confess to crimes of stone-throwing and being part of a
party, something which he denied as he spent most of his time working in
a hotel in Bethlehem. He was told if he did not confess, he would be
sent back to the soldiers that had just beaten him up. Terrified, he
“confessed”.
“The interrogator called and said my son had confessed to throwing a
stone and participating in a March. I asked him when and he said April 4
or 5 and I said it is impossible since he was in Bethlehem and I could
show the proof. The interrogator said not to make it difficult: Yasser
Mohammad had already confessed, so it would be the easiest if he just
apologised and the judge released him,” Abu Ehab explained.
After the trial, Yasser Mohammad was sentenced to 18 days in jail and
fined 1,500 shekels (Dh1,546). While the West Bank celebrated Eid Al
Fitr, Yasser Mohammad spent the holiday in prison cut off from his
family.
Child prisoners
According to the NGO Defence for Children International (DCI), every
year between 500 to 700 Palestinian children, some as young as 12, are
detained and prosecuted in the Israeli military court system. As of July
31, 195 Palestinian children were in prison.
Most children have been convicted of “stone-throwing”. In extreme cases
this can carry a 20-year sentence, but they often spend between three
to six months in prison. Other common arrests are for being a member of
an outlawed party or throwing explosive devices such as Molotov
cocktails.
In June, the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child expressed its
“deepest concern about the reported practice of torture and ill
treatment of Palestinian children arrested, prosecuted and detained by
the Israeli army and the police”.
The committee stated that the youth are usually arrested during
nighttime raids, handcuffed and sometimes physically abused and
transported to detention centres to be interrogated while their parents
are kept in the dark about their whereabouts.
According to testimonies of 311 children collected by DCI, the journey
to the interrogation centre is routinely accompanied by further ill
treatment. While cases vary with each arrest, children have reported
physical and verbal abuse, death threats and in some cases sexual
assault.
“These crimes are perpetrated from the time of arrest, during transfer
and interrogation, to obtain a confession but also on an arbitrary basis
as testified by several Israeli soldiers as well as during pretrial
detention,” the committee said.
None of the 311 children was accompanied by a lawyer during their interrogation and only two were accompanied by a parent.
Many similar cases
Many others would find Yasser Mohammad’s story familiar, especially
those in Palestinian villages or refugee camps such as Gush Etzion,
Karmi Zur and Beit Ummar, which are located near Israeli colonies or
along roads that the colonies use. They are often subjected to raids.
During 2013, Israeli soldiers entered Beit Ummar 35 times arresting 17
people, including seven children, according to DCI-Palestine.
“The issue of child arrests is related to of security. When there is a
tense security situation, the number of arrests goes up. The biggest was
between 2002 and 2003 [the Second Intifada],” said Ayed Abu Eqtaish,
accountability programme director at DCI–Palestine.
On January 14, 2013, 15-year-old Salah was arrested by Israeli soldiers
near the village of Qalqiliya. He was looking for sage plants in the
small forest near his village when four Israeli soldiers accused him of
having thrown stones. Salah denied this. Salah’s hands were then tied
tightly behind his back with a plastic cord and brought to a military
jeep. Israeli soldiers inside the jeep verbally abused Salah. After the
jeep stopped, “they pulled me out and made me walk for about ten
minutes, with one of them kicking me from behind. I was kept tied and
blindfolded. I fell twice,” Salah said.
At Ariel police station, the Israelis interrogated Salah without
informing him of his rights and ordered him to sign a statement written
in Arabic without explaining it to him.
In March 2013, 16-year-old Mohammad K. was arrested from his house at
5am and accused of throwing stones. He was placed in solitary
confinement for several days and subjected to multiple interrogation
sessions involving threats and physical violence. “I was in bad shape
and hurting, so I decided to ‘confess’ to everything to get myself out
of the cell and put an end to this humiliation,” he said.
This pattern of abuse was also revealed when more than 30 former
Israeli soldiers disclosed their experiences in a booklet of testimonies
published by Breaking the Silence, an organisation of former Israeli
soldiers dedicated to publicising the day-to-day actions of the army in
the occupied territories.
One former soldier describes serving in Hebron in 2010: “There are
those annoying moments when you’re on an arrest mission, and there’s no
room in the police station, so you just take the child back with you,
blindfold him, put him in a room and wait for the police to come and
pick him up in the morning. He sits there like a dog …”
Legal amendments
The Israeli military detention system consists of a network of military
bases, interrogation and detention centres, and police stations across
the West Bank, occupied East Jerusalem and in Israel. Any Palestinian
arrested in the West Bank is tried in one of the two Israeli military
courts.
A military juvenile court was established in September 2009, following
mounting criticism relating to the prosecution of children as young as
12 in the same military courts used to prosecute adults. Under the new
provisions, children should be tried separately from adults in the
military juvenile court and after conviction and before sentencing, the
court should prepare a social welfare report of the child’s
circumstances.
However, these new provisions relating the preparation of social
welfare reports are almost never invoked. According to a recent report
published by the Israeli organisation No Legal Frontiers, “The
establishment of the military juvenile court brought about only a
marginal change in the legal proceedings against Palestinian minors in
the West Bank. The amendment of military law that led to the
establishment of the military juvenile court had no effect at all on the
interrogation and arrest procedure which are critical stages that
dictate the outcome of the whole legal process.”
A visit to the Ofer Military Court reveals a demeaning environment for
both the arrested children and the visiting families. Families arriving
to see their children in court are made to go through a series of
waiting rooms that are hemmed in by metal fencing. This is, in almost
all cases, where they see their child for the first time after the
arrest. In court, the minors are brought in groups of three or four,
handcuffed to each other and their feet bound together.
Volunteers for No Legal Frontiers observed the trials of Palestinian
minors in the military juvenile court in Ofer Camp between April 2010
and March 2011. According to them, the vast majority of files were based
on the defendants’ confessions given during police interrogations and
on incrimination by boys of similar ages growing up in similar
circumstances. However this form of evidence is problematic. Under
Israel’s laws, the confession of a defendant given to the police under
duress is not admissible as evidence. Also, violation of a defendant’s
rights in the interrogation stage can lead to disqualification of a
confession: the testimony of a witness not given of their free will, or
given under duress or involving denial of rights, may be rejected by the
court or given only little weight.
In no case was there a trial within a trial on the admissibility of the
confessions, even though in some of the cases serious allegations of
similar nature were made about the interrogation: night arrests and
night interrogations, beatings, threats, and extreme violations of the
suspects’ right to consult lawyers and to remain silent.
At least 90 per cent plead guilty as this is the quickest way out of a
system that denies children bail in 87 per cent of cases.
“The reason why there is such a high percentage of those found guilty
is because children confess to crimes during interrogation whether they
have done them or not. The role of the court is not to argue how the
evidence was collected. The role of the court is that they have the
evidence. If lawyers want to prove that these confessions were extracted
by force and that the children are innocent and did not commit these
offences, it takes a lot of time. The quickest way out of the system is
for the defence lawyer and the prosecutor to reach a bargain by agreeing
on a sentence, and to do that, the accused has to plead guilty,”
Eqtaish said.
Once convicted, the children face time in prison where in many cases they do no see their family until they are released.
“For their family to visit, they should have a permit which is
coordinated through the Red Cross that sometimes takes 2 to 3 months and
in some cases is refused for security reasons without clarifying what
the security reason is,” Eqtaish said.
Life after arrest
The ordeal doesn’t end once the children are released from prison. A
month after his arrest and imprisonment, Yasser Mohammad sits in his
living room surrounded by his family and neighbours. His father has to
pay the medical bills of treatment for the injuries sustained during his
arrest. During his time in prison Yasser Mohammad also lost his job; it
will be difficult to find one again in the West Bank. And there is the
psychological impact: he still has nightmares about men in uniform
raiding his house in the middle of the night.
“I believe that everybody who passes through this system will be
psychologically affected,” Eqtaish. Once arrested, this is something
that a child carries as a burden for many years to come, which is why
the arrest, interrogation and imprisonment of juveniles (if needed)
should be treated with a lot more care and sensitivity.
Based in Manila, Aya Lowe writes business, travel and human interest stories around South East Asia and the Middle East.
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