TEHRAN (Iran News) – A new report has exposed the shocking scale of Palestinian children that have been have been detained by the Israeli regime from 2015 until today.
According to the Palestinian Prisoner Society (PPS), more than 9,000 Palestinian boys and girls have been placed behind bars by the occupation forces.
Palestinian kids have had their childhood stolen away from them on a regular basis by the occupation forces. In many cases the arrests that take place involve children being dragged off the streets by the regime forces and thrown in the back of military jeeps.
In other cases, heavily armed Israeli forces storm family homes in the middle of the night, literally exploding the doors off their hinges, dragging children away from their parents and again throwing them in the backs of military jeeps, often kicking or hitting them with the backs of rifles.
In most cases, the detained children are subject to interrogation without the presence of their parents or an attorney or placed in solitary confinement, while there is ongoing and systematic torture.
According to PPS testimonies provided by the minors show that most of them underwent some sort of physical or psychological torture at the hands of their Israeli interrogators using a range of mechanisms and methods in violation of laws, international agreements, and conventions on children’s rights.
PPS says 19,000 children have been detained since the outbreak of the second Intifada (uprising) in September 2000 that including children less than ten years of age. The report also stated that about 19,000 girls and boys were detained between 2000 and March 2022.
160 children under the age of 18 are currently serving time in Israeli prisons.
The regime has also been documented by other Palestinian advocacy groups as targeting children who suffer from medical conditions and are held without charge or trial under administrative detention.
In other words, Palestinian kids are not treated any differently from Palestinian adults when it comes to Israel’s cruel imprisonment.
When kids are regularly dragged off the street for throwing stones at regime forces it does beg the question what threat do they pose toward Israeli regime tanks and warplanes?
Palestinian advocates say it just reflects the exceptionally brutal and illicit apartheid regime which has been practicing, what is known under international law, as state-sponsored terrorism for decades now.
The lack of international media attention towards the regime’s war crimes has also been a source of major concern and alarm.
Analysts have been making increasing comparisons with the Western media’s rolling non-stop coverage of the unfortunate conflict in Ukraine and the lack of any coverage of Israeli attacks and war crimes against the Palestinians during the same period let alone over the past 74 years.
The only coverage by western government’s state media is the narrative that Israel has the right to defend itself which means Palestinians only have a right to die, while the coverage in Ukraine has been the exact opposite.
The question that also raises itself is: what’s the difference between the sanctity of Ukrainian children and the sanctity of Palestinian children?
Is there a difference or really just a matter of an exceptionally hypocritical political class in the West and it’s complicit media that covers up the reality?
There is certainly a double standard that reflects imperialist interest. The corporate media or state-sponsored media in Western imperialist powers avoid paying any attention to the war crimes happening in the occupied Palestinian territories while at the same time actively justifying them.
Just like the media in the U.S. and the UK and some European countries who are part of NATO are taking sides in the Ukraine conflict, they are doing the same in the occupied Palestinian territories.
Unfortunately in the occupied Palestinian territories, “their side” is the side of the colonizer, the side of the occupier, the side of the perpetrator of apartheid, and the side of the war criminal.
What we see, instead of reality, is propaganda demonizing the Palestinians’ legitimate resistance which is an absolute and fundamental right under international law to resist occupation and aggression. And that involves any necessary resistance including armed struggle.
Instead in the occupied Palestinian territories, this is demonized, which analysts say is a double standard that shows these countries are not just onlookers in the ongoing crimes taking place but complicit participants and perpetrators in the Israeli regime’s ongoing war crimes against the occupied Palestinians.
The Commission for Detainees and Ex-Detainees’ Affairs, says Israeli occupation forces have arrested more than 50,000 Palestinian children since 1967. Abdul Nasser Ferwaneh, the commission’s head of Studies and Documentation Department, says this number, includes girls and boys, stressing that Israel does not respect international laws and conventions when it comes to dealing with minors.
About 1,300 Palestinian children were detained in 2021, Ferwaneh said; a 140 percent increase in the rate of child detentions compared to the previous year. Since the start of 2022, Ferwaneh said, Israel has detained more than 200 children.
But analysts say the number fails to reflect the hundreds of thousands of other children who are arrested, interrogated, and then sent home who might not have been placed in a jail cell but nevertheless subjected to the same psychological trauma that has been going on for decades.
Meanwhile, according to a new report published by the Ministry of Health, during the year 2021, Israeli occupation forces also killed 355 Palestinians and injured more than 16,500 others. It said that 265 of the Palestinians killed by the regime were in the besieged Gaza Strip and mainly during the Israeli war on Gaza in May of last year, and 90 were in the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem (Al-Quds).
Most of the injuries registered by the ministry were also recorded in May during Israel’s 11-day aggression against Gaza, the ministry said, adding that 3000 injuries were hospitalized, including 2131 in the besieged Gaza Strip and 964 in the occupied territories’ hospitals.
According to data provided by the ministry, the number of Palestinians killed by Israel in 2021 jumped from 10 in April to 303 in May. Among those killed, 87 were children, 60 were women, and 18 were elderly.
The Ministry of Health said that in the occupied West Bank, the Nablus district recorded the highest number of Palestinians killed by Israelis and reached 30, followed by 14 in Jenin, 13 in Ramallah and al-Bireh district, 11 in the Hebron district, and 10 in the Jerusalem district.
In the Gaza Strip, 120 Palestinians were killed in Gaza City, 75 in northern Gaza, and 34 in the Khan Yunis area in the south.
Injuries by live bullets jumped as well from 56 in April 2021 to 2866 in May of the same year as a result of the war on Gaza. One out of four live bullet injuries was a child less than 18 years old, said the report. It said that 50% of the injuries were due to live bullets, and that out of the 964 injuries treated at the West Bank hospitals, 35% were in the upper extremities.
“This indicates that the Israeli soldiers had the will to kill Palestinians especially if we take in consideration the 50% live-bullet rate,” said the Health Ministry in its report.
