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22 December 2010
By
Jonathan Cook
Israeli police have been
criticised over their treatment of hundreds of
Palestinian children, some as young as seven, arrested
and interrogated on suspicion of stone-throwing in
East Jerusalem.
In the past year,
criminal investigations
have been opened against more than 1,200 Palestinian
minors in Jerusalem on stone-throwing charges,
according to police statistics gathered by the
Association of
Civil Rights
in Israel (ACRI). That was nearly twice the number of
children arrested last year in the much larger
Palestinian territory of the
West Bank.
Most of the arrests have
occurred in the Silwan district, close to Jerusalem's
Old City, where 350 extremist Jewish settlers have set
up several heavily guarded illegal enclaves among
50,000 Palestinian residents.
Late last month, in a sign
of growing anger at the arrests, a large crowd in
Silwan was reported to have prevented police from
arresting Adam Rishek, a seven-year-old accused of
stone-throwing. His parents later filed a complaint
claiming he had been beaten by the officers.
Tensions between residents
and settlers have been rising steadily since the
Jerusalem municipality unveiled a plan in February to
demolish dozens of Palestinian homes in the Bustan
neighbourhood to expand a Biblically-themed
archeological park run by Elad, a settler organisation.
The plan is currently on
hold following US pressure on
Benjamin Netanyahu,
the Israeli prime minister.
Fakhri Abu Diab, a local
community leader, warned that the regular clashes
between Silwan's youths and the settlers, termed a
"stone intifada" by some, could trigger a full-blown
Palestinian uprising.
"Our children are being
sacrificed for the sake of the settlers' goal to take
over our community," he said.
In a recent report,
entitled Unsafe Space, ACRI concluded that, in the
purge on stone-throwing, the police were riding
roughshod over children's legal rights and leaving
many minors with profound emotional traumas.
Testimonies collected by
the rights groups reveal a pattern of children being
arrested in late-night raids, handcuffed and
interrogated for hours without either a parent or
lawyer being present. In many cases, the children have
reported physical violence or threats.
Last month 60 Israeli
childcare and legal experts, including Yehudit Karp, a
former deputy attorney-general, wrote to Mr Netanyahu
condemning the police behaviour.
"Particularly troubling,"
they wrote, "are testimonies of children under the age
of 12, the minimal age set by the law for criminal
liability, who were taken in for questioning, and who
were not spared rough and abusive interrogation."
Unlike in the West Bank,
which is governed by
military law,
children in East Jerusalem suspected of stone-throwing
are supposed to be dealt with according to Israeli
criminal law.
Israel annexed East
Jerusalem following the
Six-Day war
of 1967, in violation of international law, and its
250,000 Palestinian inhabitants are treated as
permanent Israeli residents.
Minors, defined as anyone
under 18, should be questioned by specially trained
officers and only during daylight hours. The children
must be able to consult with a lawyer and a parent
should be present.
Ronit Sela, a spokeswoman
for the Association of Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI),
said her organisation had been "shocked" at the large
number of children arrested in East Jerusalem in
recent months, often by units of undercover policemen.
"We have heard many
testimonies from children who describe terrifying
experiences of violence during both their arrest and
their later interrogation."
Muslim, 10, lives in the
Bustan neighbourhood and in a house that Israeli
authorities have ordered demolished. His case was
included in the ACRI report, and in an interview he
said he had been arrested four times this year, even
though he was under the age of criminal
responsibility. On the last occasion, in October, he
was grabbed from the street by three plain-clothes
policemen who jumped out a van.
"One of the men grabbed me
from behind and started choking me. The second grabbed
my shirt and tore it from the back, and the third
twisted my hands behind my back and tied them with
plastic cords. ‘Who threw stones?' one of them asked
me. ‘I don't know,' I said. He started hitting me on
the head and I shouted in pain."
Muslim was taken into
custody and released six hours later. A local doctor
reported that the boy had bleeding wounds to his knees
and swelling on several parts of his body.
Muslim's father, who has
two sons in prison, said the boy was waking with
nightmares and could no longer concentrate on his
school studies. "He has been devastated by this."
Ms Sela said arrests had
risen sharply in Silwan since September, when a
private security guard at a settler compound shot dead
a Palestinian man, Samer
Sirhan, and
injured two others.
Clashes between the
settlers and Silwan youths came to prominence in
October when David Beeri, director of settler
organisation Elad, was shown on camera driving into
two boys as they threw stones at his car.
One, Amran Mansour, 12, who
was thrown over the bonnet of Mr Beeri's car, was
arrested shortly afterwards in a late-night raid on
his family's home.
Also in October, nine
rightwing Israeli MPs complained after stones were
thrown at their minibus as they paid a solidarity
visit to
Beit
Yonatan, a large settler-controlled house in Silwan.
Israel's courts have ordered that the house be
demolished, but Jerusalem's mayor, Nir
Barkat, has
refused to enforce the order.
In the wake of the attack,
Yitzhak
Aharonovitch, the
public security minister,
warned: "We will stop the stone-throwing through the
use of covert and overt force, and bring back quiet."
Last month police announced
that
house arrests
would be used against children more regularly and
financial penalties of up to $1,400 would be imposed
on parents.
B'Tselem, an
Israeli human rights
group, reported the case of "A.S.", a 12-year-old
taken for interrogation following an arrest at 3am.
"I sat on my knees facing
the wall. Every time I moved, a man in civilian
clothes hit me with his hand on my neck … The man
asked me to prostrate myself on the floor and ask his
forgiveness, but I refused and told him that I do not
bow to anyone but Allah. All the while, I felt intense
pain in my feet and legs. I felt intense fear and I
started shaking."
In a statement B'Tselem
said: "It is hard to believe that the security forces
would have acted similarly against Jewish minors."
Micky Rosenfeld, a police
spokesman, denied that the police had violated the
children's rights. He added: "It is the responsibility
of parents to stop this criminal behaviour by their
children."
Jawad Siyam, a local
community activist in Silwan, said the goal of the
arrests and the increased settler activity was to
"make life unbearable and push us out of the area".
The 60 experts who wrote to
Mr Netanyahu warned that the children's abuse led to "post-traumatic
stress disorders,
such as nightmares, insomnia, bed-wetting, and
constant fear of policemen and soldiers". They also
noted that children under extended
house arrest
were being denied the right to schooling.
Last year the United
Nations Committee Against Torture expressed "deep
concern" at Israel's treatment of Palestinian minors,
saying Israel was breaking the UN Convention on the
Rights of Children, which it has signed.
Over the past 12 months,
Defence for Children
International
has provided the UN with details of more than 100
children who claim they were physically or
psychologically abused while in military custody.
Jonathan Cook is a
writer and journalist based in
Nazareth, Israel.
His latest books are "Israel and the Clash of
Civilisations:
Iraq,
Iran
and the Plan to Remake the
Middle East"
(Pluto
Press) and
"Disappearing Palestine: Israel's Experiments in Human
Despair" (Zed Books). His website is
www.jkcook.net. |
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