Newsletter - September 2015
Detention figures – According to the Israeli Prison Service (IPS), as of 31 August 2015, there were 5,373 Palestinians (West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza) held as "security prisoners" in Israeli detention facilities including 156 children. In the case of children there was a 2 per cent increase in the number compared with the previous month and an annual decrease of 12 per cent compared with 2014. According to the IPS, 47 per cent of Palestinian children and 86 per cent of adults continue to be detained in facilities inside Israel, in violation of Article 76 of the Fourth Geneva Convention. A further 1,951 Palestinians were held in IPS detention as "criminal prisoners" including 27 children. Criminal offences include entering Israel without a permit, most frequently in pursuit of work. More statistics
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Briefing Note – In September MCW issued a Briefing Note reviewing developments in the Israeli military detention system for children during the period January to August 2015 (Reporting Period). Included in the Briefing Note is a
Comparative Graph monitoring progress across 13 issues of concern based on 257 testimonies collected since 2013. This data tends to confirm UNICEF’s conclusion that the ill-treatment of children appears to be “widespread, systematic and institutionalized” and there has been little substantial improvement since the UN agency published the report Children In Israeli Military Detention in March 2013.
Briefing Note
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Link between child detention and settlements raised in Australian Parliament – On 15 September, the link between the detention of Palestinian minors and the presence of Israeli settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem was raised in the Australian Parliament during a debate on the Middle East. Laurie Ferguson MP stated that: “The organisation Military Court Watch has shown a causative link between Israel's detention and mistreatment of Palestinian children and its policy of building settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories, including occupied East Jerusalem. A submission that Military Court Watch lodged with the UN special rapporteur on torture found: [T]he ill-treatment of children who come in contact with the military detention system appears to be widespread, systematic and institutionalized.”
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Shin Bet won’t be forced to record footage of interrogations - A government panel agrees with the Shin Bet security service that the agency should not be required to record footage of its interrogations, contrary to recommendations by a committee in 2013. The panel was addressing the recommendations by the Turkel Committee, which was established after the Mavi Marmara incident in May 2010, when Israeli commandos raided a Turkish protest ship headed for Gaza. The panel probed whether investigations of war-crimes claims against Israel adhered to Western standards. The government panel thus rejected the recommendations by the committee and former Shin Bet head Yuval Diskin.
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Testimony - On 18 August 2015, a 17-year-old youth from Nahhalin is arrested by Israeli soldiers at 2:00 a.m. and accused of throwing stones and starting a fire. He is released without charge two days later. “My father woke me up at around 2:00 a.m. and told me Israeli soldiers were in the house asking for me. I got up and heard soldiers talking to my father telling him they were going to arrest me because I was accused of throwing stones at the settlement of Bitar illit. The soldiers did not give my father any documentation but they told him they were going to take me for questioning at the settlement of Etzion and would send me home afterwards.
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Business as usual for children arrested by the IDF - The Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs announced in March 2013 that it would study the conclusions of a UNICEF report on children held in military detention which found that ill-treatment appeared to be “widespread, systematic and institutionalized” and work to implement them through “ongoing cooperation” with the UN agency. Two-and-a-half years on and around 2,250 arrests later, there is new evidence as to how this “cooperation” is progressing. To begin with, the number of children arrested at night appears to have jumped from 51 percent in 2013 to 65 percent today.
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