Days of Palestine – Ramallah
The Palestinian Prisoners Club said that the Israeli occupation authorities continue to target Palestinian children, using a set of tools to pursue them, execute their childhood, and rob them of their most basic rights, especially through the systematic detention operations that form a central part of the structure of the occupation’s violence, which affected thousands of children over the course of decades.
The club stated in a report issued on Sunday, on the occasion of the Palestinian Child’s Day corresponding to the fifth of April of each year, that the Israeli occupation authorities continue to arrest about (140) children under the age of (18) years.
Since the beginning of this year, and until the end of March 2021, the Israeli occupation authorities have arrested about 230 children, most of them from Jerusalem.
The arrests of children in Jerusalem constitute one of the most serious issues facing Jerusalemites, as a result of the systematic and repeated targeting of children.
The report mentioned that these children are not released either on bail, or by transferring them to "house arrest," as the Israeli occupation has tried over the past few years to convert the homes of children's families in Jerusalem into a "prison", and this issue left great challenges in terms of the relationship between children and their families, and at the community level in Jerusalem.
The report also stated that over the past years, and specifically with the beginning of the popular uprising in 2015, the occupation authorities have escalated their crimes against children, including arrests, as the number of arrests in the ranks of children reached (2000) in 2015, most of them from Jerusalem, which are the highest rate of arrests of children since 2015 until today.
The number of arrests among children from 2015 until the end of March 2021 reached more than 7,500 children who were arrested, and a portion of children was arrested in 2015, and they were sentenced to years or life imprisonment; They passed the childhood stage inside the occupation prisons.
The Israeli occupation carries out grave violations against child prisoners from the moment of their arrest and detention, which contradicts what is stipulated in many conventions for the protection of children, through the systematic arrest of them from their homes in the late hours of the night, transferring them to interrogation and arrest centers, threatening and intimidating them, and pressuring them in attempt to extract confessions from them, and keep them without food or drink for long hours, apart from directing insults and obscene language to them, and pushing them to sign statements written in Hebrew without translating them, and denying them their legal right to have a parent and lawyer present during the investigation, and to deny patients treatment, according to the report.
According to the report, systematic violations of the right of children continue after their transfer to prisons, and their detention in harsh detention conditions, in which the child is deprived of continuing their studies and their right to be cared for by their families, especially the sick and wounded among them.
There are a number of children who were injured by the bullets of the occupation, whether during the process of their arrest or before they are arrested, and those who suffer from diseases, they face another crime, which is the policy of medical negligence (slow killing).
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