Newsletter - March 2015
Detention figures – According to the Israeli Prison Service (IPS), as of 28 February 2015, there were 5,609 Palestinians (West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza) held as "security prisoners" in Israeli detention facilities including 182 children
. In the case of children this represents an increase of 12 per cent compared with the previous month and an annual decrease of 8 per cent compared with 2014. According to the IPS, 51 per cent of Palestinian children and 90 per cent of adults continue to be detained in facilities inside Israel, in violation of Article 76 of the Fourth Geneva Convention. A further 1,970 Palestinians were held in IPS detention as "criminal prisoners" including 25 children. Criminal offences include entering Israel without a permit, most frequently in pursuit of work. More statistics
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Testimony - On 5 March 2015, a 14-year-old boy is arrested by Israeli soldiers at 2.30 p.m. and is detained for over six hours before being released. The evidence suggests that this was an act of collective punishment. “I was working in our front garden with four friends when about a dozen Israeli soldiers showed up on foot. It was around 2.30 p.m. We were very surprised to see the soldiers in the middle of the village without any reason. There were no demonstrations or stone throwing incidents at the time. My friends were very scared and ran away but the soldiers ran after them and arrested them. One of the soldiers, who spoke very good Arabic, started to shout at us saying he was going to teach the village a lesson.”
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Israeli soldiers filmed waking Palestinian children in the middle of the night for questioning - Footage showing terrified Palestinian children being woken up by armed Israeli soldiers for questioning in the dead of the night has emerged. Boys as young as nine are shown being questioned about stone throwing and photographed by soldiers who dismiss their parents’ protests. A partially sighted teenage boy was among those interrogated on 23 February, according to a human rights group. Volunteers from B’Tselem, also known as the Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories, happened to be living in the flat block visited by troops in Hebron.
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+972mag: There’s no nice way of building settlements in occupied territory - UNICEF, the UN body tasked with providing humanitarian aid to children in developing countries, recently
issued an update on the progress made regarding the treatment of minors held in Israeli military detention. In its 2013 report,
Children in Israeli Military Detention, UNICEF reviewed over 400 sworn testimonies collected from minors who came in contact with Israel’s military system, and concluded that ill-treatment “appears to be widespread, systematic and institutionalized throughout the process,” and made 38 recommendations for improvement. Two years on, UNICEF is now warning that “reports of
alleged ill-treatment of children during arrest, transfer, interrogation and detention have not significantly decreased in 2013 and 2014.”
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Israel applies its penal code to the West Bank - Central Command chief Nitzan Alon signed an order applying Israel's penal code to Palestinians in the West Bank, hours before he left office earlier this week. The new order’s significance is mainly declarative. Parts of the Israeli penal code have already been adopted by military judges in the West Bank. And in general, arrest, detention and penal procedures are significantly harsher when applied to West Bank Palestinians than to Israeli citizens. However, an aspect that will not apply to the West Bank is the so-called Shai Dromi amendment enacted in 2008, which exempts a person from criminal responsibility for an “act urgently required to ward off someone who breaks into his home, business or farm.”
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