PGHIMC - Pittsburgh Independent Media Center

Hundreds of Palestinian Minors in Custody Despite International Law
by repost Thursday, Apr. 17, 2003 at 11:54 AM

About 300 Palestinian minors held in Israeli prisons, most without charges. Yet again Israel is breaking International Law while the US remains silent.

Hundreds of Palestinian Minors in Custody
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS


Filed at 7:53 a.m. ET

JERUSALEM (AP) -- About 300 Palestinian minors have been rounded up in Israeli army sweeps over the past year and are being held in crowded lockups, some without charges, lawyers and human rights monitors say.

The army acknowledges it has locked up teens, but treats those over 16 as adults, despite international conventions defining minors warranting special treatment as those under 18. Israel says militant groups often recruit teens, pointing to a 16-year-old suicide bomber, Issa Bdair from Bethlehem, who killed two Israelis in a blast in Tel Aviv last year. Several other bombers have been minors.

Roundups of Palestinians have intensified in the past year, and the International Committee of the Red Cross says a total of 7,600 Palestinians are currently in custody. Red Cross officials say they have visited 260 minors in Israeli lockups.

Israeli human rights monitors, including the respected B'tselem group, estimate about 300 Palestinians under 18 are in detention, and say many of those detained are held for minor offenses, such as throwing stones.

A 14-year-old, Ali Rahman, said he was jailed for eight days after throwing a stone at an army jeep that drove past his home in the Aida refugee camp in Bethlehem. Ali said he slept on a floor with a blanket, sharing a cell with 15 other boys at the West Bank's Etzion military detention center.

Israeli human rights lawyer Tamar Peleg represents several Palestinian teens, including Mohammed Najar from Bethlehem who was first arrested when he was 15.

Najar is being held in so-called administrative detention, a practice held over from British Mandate rule that allows the army to jail Palestinians without trial or charges. He is serving the first of renewable six-month detentions in the Ketziot tent camp, a crowded prison in Israel's southern Negev Desert.

Peleg, who works for Israel's Center for the Defense of the Individual, said military prosecutors didn't have enough evidence to charge Najar with a crime, but persuaded a military judge he was dangerous enough to keep locked up anyway.

Before being sent to Ketziot, he spent 45 days in solitary confinement in a West Bank army lockup because a judge ordered him held separately from adult prisoners. The day after he turned 16, he was moved to Ketziot prison, Peleg said.

The lawyer said Najar is one of about 30 minors, half of them under 16, being held without trial or charges.

Some of the other young prisoners she's met at military judicial hearings have complained of beatings, hunger, overcrowded rooms stuffed wall to wall with mattresses and too few trips allowed to the toilet.

Many are interrogated without the presence of lawyers and are held for months without visits from their parents, she said.

Israel is in violation of the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child, which defines minors as younger than 18, said Jessica Montell, director of B'tselem.

The treaty, which Israel signed and ratified, says the arrest and imprisonment of children should be a last resort and for the shortest appropriate time, and they should not be jailed with adults. It also gives minors the right to legal assistance, visits from relatives and to be informed of the charges against them.

The army blames the arrest of youths on violent Palestinian militant groups who recruit teens.

``They use the young children, luring them and turning them into killers,'' said Maj. Sharon Feingold, an army spokeswoman. ``They're easy prey for these terror organizations. When they are caught, they are held responsible for what they do.''

A senior army official speaking on condition of anonymity said the Etzion detention center, a facility meant to hold 50 people, now holds 71 Palestinians.

He said Etzion and other centers are meant to detain Palestinians only until space can be found at larger military and civilian prisons, which are already filled with prisoners rounded up during Israel's hunt for terrorists.

He said the army is holding 14 Palestinians younger than 16. He didn't have a figure for how many were between the ages of 16 and 18. Some of them are detained for aiding suicide bombing missions, others for such minor offenses as throwing stones at soldiers, he said.

One of them, 16-year-old Hussein Ramadan from Bethlehem's Dheisheh refugee camp, was arrested in November after soldiers confronted him about being part of a group of rock throwers, said his father, Ismail.

``This boy should be in school, not in prison,'' the father said. ``The occupation is at our doors and provokes the children.''

Bilal Ibsharat, 17, from the northern West Bank village of Tamoun, was held for seven months without trial and then released. He thinks he ended up in custody for being singled out by an informer, perhaps a classmate who didn't like him.

Ali Rahman, the 14-year-old stone-thrower, said his eight days in jail shook him up badly. ``I was really scared in prison and never want to go back,'' he said.

^--------

Associated Press reporter Ibrahim Hazboun contributed to this report.

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by . Thursday, Apr. 17, 2003 at 2:06 PM

well maybe now they'll stop throwing stones at the people in tanks! fucking morons. I wonder, did they throw stones and protest when Jordan was killing tens of thousands of them every year? Did they want their own state then? No? I wonder why not...probably because their is no such thing as a palestinian. Or at least not in the sense we think of (for thousands of years a palestinian was a jew!)

Did the entire world forget that Israel controls these territories because they were INVADED?!?! Spoils of war and all, I say not only do they have the right to that land, they need to kick out all the racist arabs there and make them live in jordan/syria. It's not like that would stop them from launching attacks on Israel.

idiot
by jew against the occupation Friday, Apr. 18, 2003 at 2:06 AM

you're an idiot. israel is and has been breaking more UN resolutions than Iraq. If anyone deserves to be bombed for possesing WMD agaiinst UN order it should be israel, but well...

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by . Friday, Apr. 18, 2003 at 9:50 AM

Israel is violating several general assembly resolutions but no security council resolutions that I'm aware of. There is a HUGE difference. The general assembly can pass any resolution they want but not really enforce it (they actually passed one that labels zionist as racism, no really they did) whereas the security council resolutions are the ones with teeth. Also, as far as I know no resolutions have been passed demanding israel disarm or anything along those lines, so they're allowed to have WMD.

As I said, if the arab world didn't want Israel to occupy these areas they shouldn't have invaded and then lost to them.

sorry
by jew against the occupation Friday, Apr. 18, 2003 at 10:29 AM

sorry i was drunk last night when i posted. but anyway, in November 1967, the UN Security Council unanimously passed resolution 242 stating "the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war" and called for the "withdrawal of Israeli armed forces from territory occupied in the recent conflict." It also called for all countries in the region to end their state of war and to respect the right of each country "to live in peace within secure and recognized boundaries." this resolution still applies. how can you say that the arabs attacked the israelis? Do you consider it a preemptive strike and declaration of war when American Indians attacked US occupying forces?

j.a.t.o.
by . Friday, Apr. 18, 2003 at 2:16 PM

I say the arabs attacked israel because that's what they did. Then when Israel kicked their asses and took over their land Israel kept that land to help secure it's borders from being attacked again (which incidently happened again 2-3 times in the 70's, in violation of that UN resolution :) But let's look at what happened...Egypt signs a peace agreement with Israel and look at what Israel did. They gave back the land. So after another long stretch they get syria to agree to stop launching attacks on Israel in exchange for their land back. What happens? Syria is still funding the terrorists launching attacks on that border, despite getting the land back. Now the land they want is further in Israel. Where does that stop? So now everyone wants a palestinian state. Why? These people didn't want a palestinian state when they were occupied by Jordan or Syria or Egypt, despite the fact that those countries killed tens of thousands every year. This is what it's boiling down to, the arab world hates jews and won't stop until they kill them all. The arab governments are backward inbred thugs who use the jews as a scapegoat to direct the masses anger away from them. It's frightningly similar to what Hitler did. The arab world hates palestinians (that's why no arab states would take them in when they fled the occupied territories) but they are more than willing to use them as a pawn to destroy Israel.

selective memory
by jew against the occupation Friday, Apr. 18, 2003 at 3:00 PM

you seem to have forgot that there were Palestinians(poorly armed peasants under fuedal leadership)living on the land before Israel was an inkling. In 1947 Jews were only one third of the population of Palestine and owned only 6% of the land. Yet the UN partition plan granted the Jewish state 55% of the total land area. The Arab state was to have an overwhelmingly Arab population, while the Jewish state would have almost as many Arabs as Jews. If it was unjust to force Jews to be a 1/3 minority in an Arab state, it was no more just to force Arabs to be an almost 50% minority in a Jewish state.The Palestinians rejected partition. The Zionists accepted it, but in private Zionist leaders had more expansive goals. In 1938, during earlier partition proposals, Ben Gurion stated, "when we become a strong power after the establishment of the state, we will abolish partition and spread throughout all of Palestine." The Mufti called Palestinians to war against partition, but in fact very few Palestinians responded. The "decisive majority" of Palestinians, confided Ben Gurion, "do not want to fight us." The majority "accept the partition as a fait accompli," reported a Zionist Arab affairs expert. The 1936-39 Arab revolt against the British had mass popular support, but the 1947-48 fighting between the Mufti's followers and the Zionist military forces had no such popular backing. But even if Palestinians were fully united in going to war against the partition plan, this can provide no moral justification for denying them their basic right of self- determination for more than half a century. This right is not a function of this or that agreement, but a basic right to which every person is entitled. I think we should just agree to disagree because this could go on forever...

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by . Friday, Apr. 18, 2003 at 3:12 PM

In 1947 Jews were only one third of the population of Palestine and owned only 6% of the land. Yet the UN partition plan granted the Jewish state 55% of the total land area. The Arab state was to have an overwhelmingly Arab population, while the Jewish state would have almost as many Arabs as Jews.

Hm, the numbers I've seen put the population of Palestine at closer to 45% jewish. At the turn of the century the arab population was largely nomadic so it was hard to count. Also, from what I've read, they were given <20% of the total land mass.

But you're right the we could disagree over this forever. Here's a good article on it tho:
http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=27338

and www.palestinefacts.org has tons of neat into on the history and current situation (along with plenty of references cited to back it up)

where i'm from
by Jew Against the Occupation Saturday, Apr. 19, 2003 at 10:28 AM

yeah, i checked out the site that you recommended. I'm not really going to comment on worldnetdaily, but they seem to be taking the stance of the book "from time Immemorial," which has since been proven to be a false hoax. False, or made up figures, false maps, you name it. the literature disproving that book is actually more extensive than the book itself. No Arab-Israeli scholar takes that book seriously. The only country in the world where that book had any influence was the US. Even in Israel, Zionist intellectuals said the book was merely restating Zionist propaganda from forty years ago. check out http://www.zmag.org, and just scroll to the middle east section. there's a HUGE amount of resources, or read any book by columbia university professor edward said.

where i'm from
by Jew Against the Occupation Saturday, Apr. 19, 2003 at 10:30 AM

yeah, i checked out the site that you recommended. I'm not really going to comment on worldnetdaily, but they seem to be taking the stance of the book "from time Immemorial," which has since been proven to be a false hoax. False, or made up figures, false maps, you name it. the literature disproving that book is actually more extensive than the book itself. No Arab-Israeli scholar takes that book seriously. The only country in the world where that book had any influence was the US. Even in Israel, Zionist intellectuals said the book was merely restating Zionist propaganda from forty years ago. check out http://www.zmag.org, and just scroll to the middle east section. there's a HUGE amount of resources, or read any book by columbia university professor edward said.