15th March 2013 | International Solidarity Movement, Hebron, Occupied Palestine
by Team Khalil
Clashes in Hebron continued on Friday 15th March, following the death of 25 year old Mahmoud Adel Tete in the nearby Al Fawar refugee camp three days previously. At around 3pm, one adult male and two boys were detained by soldiers in the Palestinian controlled H1 area, and were forced into the small terminal comprising Checkpoint 56.
The boys are aged around 9 and 11. They were held inside the sealed cabin with several soldiers for half an hour, with observers being denied access, despite repeated attempts made to ensure that the detainees were not being mistreated. All three had their hands zip-tied and the adult was blindfolded.
One of the detained children being taken to the army jeep.
The detainees were eventually removed from the checkpoint into a waiting army jeep. Soldiers stated that they would be taken to the police station. This brings the total number of Hebron citizens arrested in the last three days to eleven, none of whom have yet been released.
During the demonstration today, Israeli forces shot large amounts of teargas and rubber bullets at crowds of Palestinians protesting at the killing of Mahmoud Adel Tete, making repeated invasions into Palestinian controlled H1 area – which under the Oslo accords the Israeli army are not permitted to enter. They also invaded homes to use for further attacks on the resisting Palestinians. Several were wounded, including an international activist shot with a plastic coated steel bullet.
9 September 2012 | International Solidaity Movement, West Bank
Israeli soldiers and young Palestinian boy
Palestinian, Israeli, and international activists gathered in Beit Ummar for the village’s regular Saturday demonstration against the nearby illegal Israeli settlement of Karmei Tsur, which has annexed village land. The demonstration focused on the August 27 destruction of a new Beit Ummar greenhouse by settlers, which occurred as the Israeli military stood by. The demonstration culminated in a young boy being kicked to the ground by an Israeli soldier.
Activists from the USA, UK, Japan, and Norway joined the villagers in taking a different route to the usual Saturday demonstration, surprising the Israeli soldiers, who had assembled elsewhere. Their route as they reached the Apartheid Wall was immediately blocked by 3 soldiers with riot shields. As more soldiers arrived, this number swiftly increased to around 45 – easily outnumbering the unarmed protesters.
The Israeli military formed a line, shoulder-to-shoulder, holding large riot shields. They harassed and targeted individuals, pushing and shoving Palestinians who were attempting to walk on their own land, including young children. The demonstrators retaliated peacefully by chanting and questioning the soldiers about their decision not to take action during the settler attack on the greenhouse. Soldiers also took pictures of individuals present – pictures taken at peaceful demonstrations have in the past been used to justify arrest of Palestinians and deportation or denial of entry to internationals.
Young Palestinian boy after being kicked by Israeli soldiers
After a prolonged face-off, the end of the demonstration was announced, and the protesters turned to leave. It was at this point that a 12-year-old Palestinian boy from Beit Ummar was kicked in the leg by an Israeli soldier, knocking him to the ground. The remaining soldiers immediately tightened their line around the activists and villagers, effectively preventing them from leaving, as well as shoving many with riot shields in the process. Concerned about the child, the protesters gathered around him and he was carried away from the soldiers, where he recovered with no major physical damage. The Commander of the Israeli forces in the village refused to comment on the kicking of the boy when questioned.
Ellie is a volunteer with The International Solidarity Movement (name has been changed).
20 August 2012 | Besieged Gaza, occupied Palestine
From the children of Gaza comes this adorable animation depicting the story of 4 kids of the extended Samouni family in Gaza. By animated drawings they express what happened to them and their family during operation ‘Cast Lead’.
15 August 2012 | International Solidarity Movement, West Bank
On the evening of July 26, social media lit up with messages from residents of the village Nabi Saleh.
“Four army jeeps and around 20 soldiers standing at the entrance” tweeted Manal Tamimi, and later, “for the third day (in a [row]) the army invading the village before eftar.”
Nabi Saleh resident Manal Tamimi – click to see more photos
Since late 2010, Nabi Saleh has been raided regularly by Israeli forces, and the religious month of Ramadan is no exception. The long awaited eftar meal brings relief to the fasting people. In the little village, only a 15 minute drive northwest of Ramallah, eftar often arrives with uninvited guests.
The reasons for these punitive raids must be found in late 2009 when people from Nabi Saleh and nearby villages organized to protest the occupation and the illegal settlements.
In July 2008, Inhabitants of the illegal Israeli settlement of Halamish, some 700 metres from Nabi Saleh, began using Al-qaws spring for recreational purposes. For Palestinians in the area, the spring was a vital factor in farming the dry land, as well as for cultural and recreational purposes. When settlers began renovating the site of the spring, damaging trees and property, the Palestinian owner filed several complaints to the police but was ignored.
In January 2010, Israeli authorities deemed the spring an archaeological site. Subsequently, Palestinians were prohibited access while the illegal settlers were given free access. They continued to illegally renovate the site against a civil administration order to halt construction. Two attempts by Palestinian villages in the area to go to the Israeli High Court of Justice proved to be in vain. The only outcome was letting Palestinians return to the spring. This is hardly regarded as a victory when they are still unable to use the water that their village has relied on for so long. As well, Palestinians are still often prevented from accessing the spring, especially in groups, while settlers enjoy free access.
With health, freedom, and even life on the line, the Nabi Saleh popular protests show the Israeli authorities’ disregard for international law and human rights.
Every Friday since December 2009, a procession has been making its way from Nabi Saleh’s center square towards the stolen spring. The protest is notorious for its persistence. Confronting a powerful Israeli military force, and enduring the consequential raids and arrests is a sacrifice that many in the village are willing to take.
Bilal Tamimi, a descendent and lifelong inhabitant of Nabi Saleh and father of 4, has been participating and documenting the popular protests from the beginning.
Nabi Saleh resident Bilal Tamimi – click to see more photos
According to Bilal Tamimi, Nabi Saleh is not only protesting to return the annexed water spring, but against Israeli occupation as a whole. Since Halamish was illegally established in 1977, it has not stopped growing and encroaching onto Palestinian lands. The land theft is either approved or ignored by Israeli authorities, denying the Palestinian population the right to their land, and contravening international law. The nonviolent resistance is one of the most dangerous tendencies from an occupiers point of view. It is persistent and disturbs the normalized occupation, but it cannot be stopped without damaging Israel’s democratic smokescreen.
The united participation of all demographics of Palestinian society (i.e. men, women, children) as well as international and Israeli activists is an important factor in the popular protest.
Bilal’s wife, Manal Tamimi, who is herself an active protester, says there is a particular impact on Israeli soldiers when they are faced by women and children. Women make up half of the protests in Nabi Saleh, and many take leadership roles, contradicting the prejudices still haunting mainstream discourse.
Bilal points out the importance of post-demonstration media work from international and Israeli activists who join the weekly protest. Activists from various countries across the world sharing reports, pictures, and stories from Nabi Saleh has a huge impact on the fate of the village.
The Israeli army has changed its tactics in Nabi Saleh throughout the past 2 years. The brutal invasions of the village during the Friday protest drew negative attention from international media present at the demonstration. While the 10-hour Friday raids were made less brutal, there has been a considerable increase in raids on other days as well as during nights. Thus there has been an increased pressure on the residents’ lives, although most of it occurs behind the scenes and away from media.
Manal and Bilal Tamimi have experienced Israeli military violence since their childhood. Arbitrary arrests, including that of children, night raids, military violence, and systematic discrimination are only a part of what they have experienced. The last weeks are no exception.
Rather than showing the heavy military response to civilian demonstrations, most photos emerging into mainstream news from the West Bank focus on masked youths throwing stones.
Bilal Tamimi knows that stones will not change the course of history in a direct way.
“But what would you do if someone had been stealing from you the last 60 years, with absolutely no consequences except generous western support,” asks Bilal rhetorically.
At 3 a.m. on January 23 of 2011, 14-year old Islam Tamimi was seized from his bed by Israeli soldiers. The next 12 hours, he was interrogated and kept awake. Without being informed about his rights to remain silent or to demand the presence of a parent, the terrified boy may have began making up stories to satisfy the police. His unlawfully gained testimony is later used to convict members of the Nabi Saleh popular committee, Bassem and Naji Tamimi. Both face charges made by a 14-year old boy under torture-like conditions.
This incident is one of many concerning minors from Nabi Saleh. Currently, 4 boys are serving time for throwing stones.
Manal Tamimi herself was arrested in December 2009. Her son Samer Tamimi, who was 3 years old at the time, saw her beaten and dragged away by Israeli soldiers.
Bilal and Manal Tamimi’s youngest son, Samer – click to see more photos
Many of the village residents would send their kids away each Friday during protest hours, but as it became apparent that the situation would not change, Bilal and Manal amongst others, began to bring their children to the protests.
While this decision is difficult, Manal explains how psychologists and specialists were called to the village to treat the tormented kids. Fear of the Israeli army was the primary problem.
“We had to break this wall of fear in our kids to be able to continue the struggle in the future,” she states.
“The resistance,” Bilal says, “is for our kids’ future, so they can grow up and follow their dreams, and their kids will be able to as well”
His son Osama, 16, was accepted into a school in Jerusalem, but denied entry to the city by Israeli authorities on reasons of security. An education in Ramallah was found but Bilal clearly sees the disappointment and the extinguished enthusiasm in his son’s eyes.
“This is the way to defeat a population. Stealing their dreams is far worse than breaking their bones and this we have to fight and teach our children how to fight,” says Manal.
Her youngest son Samer, 6, is also known as ‘Spider Man’ for the costume he wears to the popular protests. Samer has managed to overcome a great amount of his fears. During a night raid on the Tamimi home about 1 month ago, Samer woke up, recognized the angry men in green, and casually returned to sleep as they ransacked his house. A clear indication that the next generation will not give in to the pressure.
Nabi Saleh is a village of only 600 people. This means a great sense of unity.
“We cry together, smile together, celebrate together, suffer together, and die together,” says Manal.
When Mustafa Tamimi was shot dead by the Israeli military last December, the funeral turned into a massive outcry for justice. The 2000 some members of the funeral were tear-gassed by the same grenades which killed Mustafa just two days earlier. Several Palestinian women were beaten by soldiers and arrests were made.
The Israeli occupation is omnipresent across Palestine, entering the private lives of all Palestinians. The last person to be killed has not yet been killed. The last illegal settlement has not yet been built. Nabi Saleh’s fresh water spring has become a memory and a dream.
Yet facing armies, still ‘Spider Man’ smiles at one of his toughest quests.
Markus Fitzgerald is a volunteer with the International Solidarity Movement (name has been changed).
The number of Palestinian children in Israeli detention has increased 40 percent since last September. (Ryan Rodrick Beiler)
A new report funded and supported by the UK government that accuses Israel of violating international law with its treatment of Palestinian child detainees was launched in London by a high-profile group of human rights lawyers on Tuesday.
But there is pessimism in some quarters that the report’s recommendations will be implemented. The document has been criticized as “toothless” by a prominent Palestinian human rights activist.
“Children in Military Custody” was funded and backed by the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office, and written by an ad hoc group including a former attorney general, a former court of appeal judge and several prominent attorneys known as QCs. The delegation visited Palestine in September and met with Palestinian, Israeli and international nongovernmental organizations, British diplomats and a wide range of Israeli government and military officials.
The report details the military law Israel applies to all Palestinians in the occupied West Bank, including children, and how it differs from the civilian law applied to Israeli settlers who live in the same territory. It states there it was “uncontested [by Israel] that there are major differentials between the law governing the treatment of Palestinian children and the law governing treatment of Israeli children.”
Unequal treatment of children
At the heart of the report are three core recommendations to the Israeli government: start applying international law to the West Bank (which Israel refuses to do), the best interests of the child should come first and, crucially, that Israel “should deal with Palestinian children on an equal footing with Israeli children.”
Israel currently applies two separate and unequal systems of laws in the West Bank. Palestinians are subject to a harsh military regime in which Israeli army officers and police, arrest, interrogate, judge and sentence, while Israeli settlers colonizing the West Bank are subject to Israeli civilian law.
These systematic inequalities include: the minimum age for Palestinian children to receive a custodial sentence is 12, but for Israelis it is 14; Palestinian children have no right to have a parent present during interrogation, while Israeli children generally do.
The most stark inequalities are evident in the time it takes for the two systems to work. Palestinian children could have to wait up to eight days before being brought before a judge, while Israeli children have a right to see one within 24 hours; Palestinian children can be detained without charge for 188 days, while for Israelis the limit is 40.
In a press release about the report, Council for Arab-British Understanding director Chris Doyle describes witnessing in Palestine “nothing less than a kangaroo court that does nothing to improve Israel’s security while criminalizing an entire generation of Palestinian children.”
Children kept in solitary confinement
Drawing on their meetings with nongovernmental organizations such as Defence for Children International-Palestine Section, the authors detail the shocking treatment of Palestinian children at the hands of Israeli soldiers.
Arrested in nighttime raids, Palestinian children are often physically and verbally abused, brought before adult military courts, shackled, given little choice than taking a plea bargain, and can be sentenced to as many as 20 years for “crimes” as trivial as stone throwing. Some are even kept in solitary confinement, according to DCI.
When Palestinian children file complaints about their abuse at the hands of Israeli soldiers, they are almost always ignored. Israeli occupation authorities were able to give to the delegation “only one example of a complaint being upheld.” The authors report that there are “a significant number of allegations of physical and emotional abuse of child detainees by the military which neither the complaints system nor the justice system is addressing satisfactorily.”
The report compiles some shocking statistics. As many as 94 percent of Palestinian children arrested in the West Bank are denied bail, according to nongovernmental organizations. Some 97-98 percent of such cases end with a plea bargain, meaning they go to jail without even reaching the trial stage (as flawed as military courts are).
A key conclusion reached by the report’s authors is that Israel is in breach of articles of UN Convention of the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) that prohibit: national or ethnic discrimination; ignoring a child’s best interests; the premature resort to detention, imprisonment and trial alongside adult prisoners; preventing prompt access to lawyers and the use of shackles.
While the report notes “the International Court of Justice’s 2004 Advisory Opinion [on Israel’s wall in the West Bank] which concludes categorically that the UNCRC is applicable in the Occupied Palestinian Territories,” Israeli officials the delegation met with refused to recognize this.
“Every Palestinian child a ‘potential terrorist’”
“In our meetings with the various Israeli Government agencies, we found the universal stance by contrast was that the Convention has no application beyond Israel’s own [pre-1967] borders,” the authors write, noting their disagreement.
They emphasize: “[t]he population of the West Bank is within the physical power and control of Israel, and Israel has effective control of the territory. Our visit dispelled any doubts we might have had about this.”
In its conclusions, the report notes that this refusal to fulfill its international law obligations with respect to Palestinian children probably “stems from a belief, which was advanced to us by [an Israeli] military prosecutor, that every Palestinian child is a ‘potential terrorist.’”
Questions about report’s future
Renowned Palestinian writer, activist and academic Ghada Karmi was at the report’s launch on Tuesday. She asked the panel if it would be doing a follow-up visit, or monitoring implementation of the report’s recommendations.
The answer was less than conclusive, with co-author Greg Davies saying they would have to “wait and see” what the Israeli government’s response would be. He later spoke to The Electronic Intifada over the phone about the report’s future: “the format in which that follow-up work takes place, I don’t know at this stage, it’s too early to tell … I’m committed to seeing as far as it’s possible these recommendations coming into effect. If that requires further work I’m prepared to organize that.”
Karmi later told The Electronic Intifada that the report is “toothless in the end” because there is no way to compel Israel to comply.
“Palestinians are fed up of being studied,” she said. What they really want to know is “how will I get help to end” the abuses of the military occupation. Karmi did however conclude the report was a good thing and the delegation was a “very interesting mission” because it was backed by the foreign office, who could not be accused of anti-Israel bias in the same way that Israel has managed to taint UN missions with “the usual slanders.”
UK government approached report’s authors
Lawyer Greg Davies was responsible for putting the ad hoc delegation together. He told The Electronic Intifada that while he was doing so, he was approached by the British Consulate in Jerusalem, who offered government funding. Davies replied in the affirmative, but on condition that the group be independent.
In response to such criticisms as Karmi’s, Davies said: “there have been a number of [such] reports submitted… those reports have largely gone unanswered [by Israel] … it was that lack of response that prompted this.”
“There isn’t an enforceability as such without the political will, and that’s where our remit stops,” he said, pointing to an Early Day Motion on the report tabled in parliament Wednesday. EDM 280 welcomes the report and “asks the Foreign Secretary to make a statement to the House [of Commons] setting out his proposals for persuading Israel to comply in practice with international law relating to the treatment of children.” Davies said of the EDM “we welcome that and are hugely encouraged by that.”
Advancing the debate
The Palestine section of Defence for Children International, through its reports and its meetings with the delegation, is one of the most quoted sources in the report. DCI-PS spokesperson Gerard Horton admitted to The Electronic Intifada that the report’s recommendations “won’t end the abuse,” but argued that some of them “will make it very difficult for the military court system to function effectively” if they were implemented.
He wrote in an email that the report’s list of forty recommendations include those DCI-PS have been demanding for years (parents present during interrogation; prompt access to a lawyer; audio-visual recording of interrogations; and an end to forcible transfer of children to prisons inside Israel in violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention).
Horton also highlighted the high profile of the report’s authors and backers: “the importance of this report is who wrote it … before real change can occur the debate has to become mainstream. People in the center and center-right have to start taking an interest and expressing a concern. To my mind this report goes some way to advancing that by helping to shift the debate to the center.”
“Justice is not a negotiable commodity”
Among the report’s forty specific recommendations are: an end to night arrests, an end to blindfolding and shackling, observing the prohibition on “violent, threatening or coercive” conduct, the presence of a parent during interrogation and “[c]hildren should not be required to sign confessions” in Hebrew, since they do not understand it.
The report notes that since the delegation’s visit, a new military order has upped to 18 the age at which Palestinian children can be tried as adults. Previously, it had been 16 (then another inequality with Israeli children who are treated as children until 18).
But there are concerns this change has been rendered void in practice. While welcoming the change, the report expresses concern “that the change does not appear to apply to sentencing provisions.”
Seemingly deliberate loopholes in the law means that “adult sentencing provisions still apply to 16 [and] 17 year olds” and that children 14-17 years old can be sentenced as adults when the maximum penalty for the offense is five years or more. The maximum penalty for throwing stones (the most common offense) ranges from 10 to 20 years,
Asked by The Electronic Intifada at the Tuesday launch why there were no specific recommendations in the report to end this inequality, Judy Khan QC said it was covered by core recommendation three, which calls for an end to the current inequalities between Israeli and Palestinian child detainees.
In their meetings with the delegation, the Israeli Ministry of Justice “described [such changes] as conditional on there being no significant unrest or ‘third intifada.’” The report objects: “[a] major cause of future unrest may well be the resentment of continuing injustice … justice is not a negotiable commodity but a fundamental human right.”
Sharp rise in child detainees
Sir Stephen Sedley, a former Lord Justice — senior appeal judge — underlined at Tuesday’s launch that there has been a 40 percent rise in child detainees since their visit in September, so the problem has only got worse since they returned to the UK.
While the report seems to have received some media coverage in the UK, it yet remains to be seen what practical impact it will have. More fundamentally, it does not call for an end to the occupation, considering political solutions beyond the authors’ mandate. It does note however that: “We have no reason to differ from the view of Her Majesty’s Government and the international community that these [Israeli] settlements [in the West Bank] are illegal. For the purposes of this report however we treat them, like the occupation, as a fact.”
But the question remains: a fact for how much longer?
Asa Winstanley is an investigative journalist from London who has lived and reported from occupied Palestine. His website is www.winstanleys.org.
