Wisam Tamimi turned 17 on June 6. Three days later, fifty Israeli soldiers broke into his house at dawn and took him away with his hands cuffed behind his back, blindfolded and under a cascade of insults. Once at a military post in the West Bank, soldiers forced him to kneel. He remained like this for five hours, he explains, in his house in Nabi Saleh, about 20 kilometers from the West Bank capital, Ramallah. They had taken off his jacket and he was cold, he remembers. He was then taken to the high-security Israeli prison of Ofer, near Ramallah, where he was stripped completely naked and searched, before being placed in solitary confinement for five days. In all that time, he only saw the Israelis who interrogated him “from 11 in the morning until nine or ten at night.” The food was “very scarce” and the threats were constant. Especially that if he did not confess, the Israeli army would demolish his parents’ house. They wanted him to sign some papers in Hebrew that he did not understand.
Wisam is one of the 171 teenagers released from prison in exchange for the release of hostages held by Hamas that included the short-lived Gaza truce, according to figures from Abdallah Zgari, president of the NGO Palestinian Prisoners Club. The majority, 107, are minors between 14 and 17 years old. The remaining 64 are now 18 years old, but were not yet 18 years old when they were arrested. Three out of four of these young people have not been convicted of any crime, according to official Israeli data.
In addition to those first five days in isolation, Wisam spent another 35 days alone in the Al Masqubiyya interrogation center in Jerusalem, in a cell where he could barely stand up (he is 1.83 meters tall) or take more than three steps. Explain. It was then, in that long month alone, subjected to constant interrogations, and with a light in the cell that flickered relentlessly, when he told himself that “sooner or later he was going to lose his mind.”
Before October 7, when Hamas killed 1,200 people in Israel, at least 250 Palestinian teenagers were imprisoned in Israeli prisons, the president of the Palestinian Prisoners Club explains by phone. After the hostage exchange in Gaza, around 80 minors remain in Israeli prisons, according to that NGO. In the eight weeks since the start of the war in the Strip, another 800 have been detained at some point, although most have since been released, Zgari notes.
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Military jurisdiction applies to Palestinian minors in Israeli prisons, whether in the occupied West Bank or occupied East Jerusalem. When they are tried, something that often does not happen, they appear before military courts whose conviction rate is more than 99%, according to the United States Department of State. Military courts only try Palestinian minors. In the extremely rare case that a Jewish minor is detained, civil law, which is much more guaranteeing, is applied.
“Palestinian children can be arrested anywhere, at checkpoints, on the way to school, during operations in cities and camps or even in their own beds,” Francesca Albanese, the UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights in the Occupied Territories of Palestine. Since 2000, 13,000 Palestinian minors have been detained, interrogated, tried and imprisoned in Israel, according to Unicef data cited by the NGO Defense for Children International Palestine.
In 1991, Israel ratified the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, which stipulates that minors should only be deprived of liberty as an exceptional measure, should not be detained illegally or arbitrarily, and should not be subjected to torture or other treatment or punishment. cruel, inhuman or degrading. The reality, collected in the 2020 Helpless report, from the NGO Save The Children, is that Israel condemns 99% of Palestinian children tried by military courts to that criminal confinement that the UN defines as “a last resort.”
Save The Children interviewed 470 children, incarcerated between the ages of 10 and 17, to prepare this document. Almost one in four reported “punching, slapping, pushing or kicking” during their arrest. Once detained, “81% were beaten and 43% received numerous beatings,” 88% did not receive the health care they needed, and 46% were deprived of food and water. More than half were threatened during interrogations with harm to their families and 73% had to sign documents in Hebrew. None of these minors were assisted by a lawyer during interrogations. “A smaller number,” the report states, suffered mistreatment such as having “dogs released or a plastic bag put over their heads.”
“[Los palestinos] “They are the only children in the world systematically tried in military courts, which invariably do not offer them a fair trial and fail to comply with the rules of juvenile justice,” says Save The Children. In 2013, Unicef considered that the mistreatment of children in the Israeli military detention system is “widespread, systematic and institutionalized.”
stones
Wisam’s story is an example of what that report tells. As in at least one case reported by the NGO, this high school student was detained after being wounded by the Israeli military. Eight days before his arrest, while he was on the roof of his uncle’s house, a rubber bullet hit his head and fractured his skull. His case also exemplifies the type of accusation that is usually brought against Palestinian minors. The young man was going to be accused – the charges were never filed – of crimes such as “planting a land mine”, “possession of weapons and explosives” and, the most common: “throwing stones”, which is punishable by up to 20 years in prison. jail. Wisam was also going to be charged with “traffic violations.” “I don’t even have a driver’s license,” he laughs.
From Wisam’s house you can see the road for Jewish settlers only that leads to the settlement of Halamish. The violence caused by these illegal settlements, built on land usurped from the Palestinians, is also reflected in the detention and imprisonment of minors. The NGO Military Court Watch calculated in 2019 that Palestinian minor prisoners lived an average of 900 meters from one of these colonies.
Administrative detention without revealing the accusation
In Ramallah, Ahmed shows a mark on his wrist. It is the scar from plastic ties so tight “that they made him bleed.” Ahmed, 19 years old and whose real name is not given for security reasons, was also released in the exchange with Hamas. The first time he was arrested he was 13 years old. A large number of soldiers broke into his house at three in the morning and took him handcuffed and blindfolded to a military base, he recalls, where they forced him to strip naked for a search. “I was very scared. He was 13 years old,” he states. He was accused of throwing stones. He was sentenced to a year in prison, but his family managed to avoid it by paying a fine of 12,000 shekels, about 3,000 euros.
In September 2022, the military detained him again. Since the young man, then 17 years old, was not at home, they took his brother. That same day, Ahmed turned himself in. He was again accused of throwing stones and sentenced to four months in prison. When he was about to serve his sentence, the military court prolonged his imprisonment with six months of administrative detention.
The victims of this legal figure are held without trial and on the basis of supposed evidence that is not revealed to the accused, so the prisoner does not know what he is accused of or when he will be released from prison. This type of detention can be extended every six months without a time limit. According to Abdallah Zgari, there are about 20 children detained in this way in Israeli prisons.
Mohamed Abu Ayyash, 18, is another of the Palestinian teenagers in administrative detention released by the exchange with Hamas. The story he tells in his home in Ramallah is, once again, similar to that of his imprisoned contemporaries: a violent arrest at the age of 17, at dawn and by special forces that “surrounded the house”; the transfer tied with plastic ties — “six, one on top of the other,” he details — and blindfolded. A “12-hour” interrogation at a military base and a new transfer in which the soldiers dragged him by the bridles. Then, the scarce food—yogurt, bread and “half a kilo of hummus for 40 prisoners”—and confinement with adults, prohibited by international law. Then, administrative detention, whose last extension of six months, Mohamed was a few days away from completing when he was released.
This young man was not beaten when he was a minor. This type of mistreatment began after the Hamas attack, when he was 18 years old, he clarifies. The Palestinian prisoners then had their “electronic devices, blankets, mattresses, sheets and even clothing” taken away. For 30 days, he remained “in the same pants, a T-shirt and no underwear,” he explains. In a transfer from Ofer prison to Naqab, another prison in southern Israel, inmates were handcuffed and then the handcuffs were attached to shackles on their ankles. “If they just kicked you, you could be happy,” says the teenager. On the bus, he remembers, “there were several children.”
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