The Guardian reports: A belief that every Palestinian child is a potential terrorist may be leading to a “spiral of injustice” and breaches of international law in Israel’s treatment of child detainees in military custody, a delegation of eminent British lawyers has concluded in an independent report backed by the Foreign Office.
The nine-strong delegation, led by the former high court judge Sir Stephen Sedley and including the UK’s former attorney-general Lady Scotland, found that “undisputed facts” pointed to at least six violations of the UN convention on the rights of the child, to which Israel is a signatory. It was also in breach of the fourth Geneva convention in transferring child detainees from the West Bank to Israeli prisons, the delegation said.
Its report, Children in Military Custody, released on Tuesday, was based on a visit to Israel and the West Bank last September funded and facilitated by the Foreign Office and the British consulate in Jerusalem.
It makes 40 specific recommendations concerning the treatment of Palestinian child detainees.
The issue has come under increasing scrutiny by human rights organisations and visiting delegations over the past year. In January the Guardian highlighted the use of solitary confinement in a report on the experiences of children under the military justice system.
The Independent adds: Last night the Foreign Office, which backed the report, said it would be taking up the claims with the Israeli authorities:
“The UK government has had long-standing concerns about the treatment of Palestinian children in Israeli detention, and as a result decided to fund this independent report. While recognising that some positive recent steps have been made by the Israeli authorities, we share many of the report’s concerns, and will continue to lobby for further improvements.”
While the legal team said it was in no position to prove the truth of the claims of cruelty made repeatedly by Palestinian children, but denied by the Israeli authorities – which offered unprecedented access to the delegation – it pointed to the disparity in the law.
Israeli children must have access to a lawyer within 48 hours and cannot be imprisoned under the age of 14. But Palestinian children as young as 12 are jailed and can be kept for three months without legal representation. Between 500 and 700 are jailed each year.
Is it not finally time for the only nation in the world that exists as a result of Western pity and remorse to be told to fly right or go down in flames by that very same West?
Israel is NOT a country. It is a pseudo-country run by a bunch of shysters and thieves who steal the money that Diaspora Jews and Western governments with a humanitarian memory lavish $billions upon, as on NO OTHER! So long as it is democratic and more or less fair to all its citizens, it is best to do nothing which might magnify the historic wrong of the Holocaust despite conceivably legitimate grievances. But once it became a Zionazi state sacrilegiously whining about the Holocaust so as to drown out the wails of its Arab victims, it is time for the West to cut off the umbilical cord that is turning a once promising fetus into a metastatic tumor instead. It is total imbecility and moral depravity to be pressuring Iran with no holds barred to stop it from getting a nuclear bomb while allowing the “light onto the nation” Zionism of old to turn into super-nuclear Zionazism with all its racist, terrorist and kleptomaniacal betrayal of friends that is now the case. Since the murder of Rabin– once a “break their bones” militarist that had turned into one of the word’s finest humanitarianist– by one of the mad men typical of the psychos that forms the phalanxes of today’s Zionazi murderous regime because he, Rabin, wanted a peace in which all of the region’s children can grow up healthy, wealthy and wise, Israel has fallen prey to criminal politicos with multiple passports and nest eggs well feathered abroad. These a moral types aligned with the immoral types to recreate a Sodom and Zamora-type state in which both Israeli Sabras and Arabs are prisoners for life or when exterminated on whim of these Zionazi Holocaust Psychotics. It’s time for America’s political whores in politics to recognize their fatherhood of this monstrous cabal through their generosity with the cash of the people they represent for campaign cash from Zionists in America. Israel has declared all its nukes aimed exclusively, “at Arab population centers.” This it declared so it could do with Arabs what Kosher law forbids it from doing with pigs. The crime is not only theirs but ours too for we are its total and only sustenance as is. Let’s set it right so we can only then set right our support for a real Arab Spring. Is not the treatment of children like that for pigs on the way to slaughter enough to scream: ENOUGH”?
The children Israel abuses could be your own. Think about that when you look at your kids and ask yourself if you can sit back and allow this abuse of both Jewish and Arab Israeli kids to go on.
You are perfectly right. But as Noam Chomsky says palestinians (including their children) are unpersons. And that narrative has been promoted by the “west”