Israel’s Detention of Palestinian Minors Criticized

Sleep can be fleeting in this dusty Palestinian hamlet. The families here know that they might be jolted awake in the dead of night by a pounding at the door, the prelude to a search or the arrest of someone in the household by Israeli soldiers.

But Hakmeh Barghouti, who had seen three of her five sons hauled off on prior occasions, wasn’t prepared when the army came for her youngest. Blindfolded, his hands tied behind his back, 14-year-old Mohammed was led away in the wee hours this spring after his mother frantically helped him get dressed.

“I never thought they would come for him,” she said. “I thought they would take one of the older ones.”

Thus began a frightening experience for Mohammed, marked by what he described as interrogations, beatings and squalid conditions inside an Israeli detention center for Palestinians accused of security offenses. In Mohammed’s case, that meant throwing rocks at soldiers and armored vehicles that rumbled through his village.

The teenager appeared before a military judge and spent two weeks in custody -- without a visit from his parents or a lawyer -- before being released.

His situation is not unique. Human rights activists are alarmed by the number of Palestinians younger than 18 who are being locked up by the Israeli government as part of its crackdown on the nearly 3-year-old Palestinian uprising, or intifada.

The issue was highlighted this month by the Israeli government’s release of a few hundred Palestinian prisoners, who were set free in an effort to prevent the peace process from breaking down. Among those freed were about a dozen minors.

On Friday, the Israelis released 73 more prisoners, almost all of them adults and common criminals.

Even during a temporary cease-fire declared by the main Palestinian militant groups, the Israeli government has continued to detain suspected members of Hamas and Islamic Jihad, including juveniles. Many of these incarcerated youths are treated the same as adults -- from questioning to sentencing -- in violation of international agreements such as the Geneva Convention and the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child, critics say.

Some youths are held with adult men and women in detention wards. Others are in prisons that their families cannot visit because of restrictions that Israel places on the movement of Palestinian residents in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Israel defends its policies, saying the lives of its people are at stake. Today’s stone-thrower could be tomorrow’s terrorist, the government says, and should be dealt with sternly to deter future attacks.

Underscoring Israel’s security concerns, two suicide bombings that rocked the country and the West Bank last week were committed by 17-year-old boys.

Israel defines a minor as someone younger than 16, not younger than 18 as most Western countries do. Yet this standard applies only to Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Israeli youths -- including the sons and daughters of Jewish settlers who live in the West Bank and Gaza -- are considered minors until they turn 18. Two 16-year-olds living a short walk apart, on the same rocky West Bank hillside, are thus treated differently by the legal system because one is Israeli and the other Palestinian.

“We believe a state cannot have two definitions of minors,” said Yael Stein of the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem, which has been highly critical of the treatment of young Palestinians. “If the definition of a minor is 18 inside of Israel, it should be the same inside the occupied territories. It is a huge problem that the same country has two standards.”

Israeli military officials acknowledge that the detention of juveniles is a sensitive issue, but the officials contend that the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child allows Israel to choose the age at which it deems fit to try youths for criminal offenses.

Israeli officials also maintain that Palestinian youngsters are better treated now than before the 1967 Middle East War, when the West Bank was held by Jordan and children were considered minors only until age 12.

An Israeli military officer who requested anonymity defended the dual system for defining the age of majority. “The problem is, the number of terrorists between the ages of 16 and 18 is huge.... That’s the age when people who want to join the fighting do.”

As with so many things in this polarized land, the exact number of youths in detention is in dispute. Nonprofit groups such as Defense for Children International and the International Committee of the Red Cross estimate that up to 360 Palestinians younger than 18 are in Israeli custody for security offenses -- mostly for hurling stones, but sometimes for more violent acts.

The Israeli military puts the number of under-18 Palestinians in lockups at a “few dozen.” But army officials acknowledged this year that their soldiers arrest, on average, five youths under age 16 every week, usually for stone-throwing.

Many are released relatively quickly. But some are kept under “administrative detention,” a holdover from the days of British rule that allows authorities to keep a suspect behind bars for up to six months without pressing charges, as long as the person is deemed a security risk.

The six-month term is renewable, so a detainee can spend a year or more under lock and key without trial.

Between 20 and 30 Palestinians younger than 18 are in administrative detention, according to human rights groups. The Israeli military said this month that it is holding 11 youths under age 16 in its detention centers but did not provide figures for 16- and 17-year-old detainees.

Mohammed Barghouti -- who is not related to imprisoned Fatah leader Marwan Barghouti -- wound up in the Ofer detention center after being rustled out of bed by Israeli soldiers April 4. He and a cousin from Deir Abu Mishal, their village near the West Bank city of Ramallah, were taken in for throwing rocks, which they admit to doing.

At first, the boys said, they were interrogated separately while blindfolded and bound.

Islam Barghouti, 14, said his interlocutors questioned him for about 2 1/2 hours and sometimes struck him -- on his back, his feet, his stomach -- “wherever they could hit.”

“Sometimes they accused us of things we didn’t do,” he said.

Mohammed Zahran, 16, a friend who had been arrested two days earlier, said that when he was questioned, his interrogator “asked me to confess to throwing 1,045 stones. I only confessed to 35.”

Eventually, he signed a statement brought to him. “It was all in Hebrew. I had no idea what it meant,” he said. “They told me to sign, and I signed.”

Neither their parents nor lawyers were present when the three boys were questioned. Khalid Quzmar, an attorney with Defense for Children International, said most young Palestinians confess within the first two hours in custody and sign statements written in a language they don’t understand.

An army spokesman said he did not know the specifics of how the boys were treated after their arrest, but he dismissed allegations that they had been beaten.

“In general, the orders are absolutely strict: Nothing is to be done [to cause] physical harm to any prisoners, all the more so [with] minors,” the spokesman said.

From the Ofer detention center, which is little more than a makeshift tent camp surrounded by razor wire, the three teenagers were transferred to a facility at nearby Beit El, the site of a military court.

The boys said they were jammed with a fourth into a filthy cell designed for fewer inmates. Bathroom breaks came two or three times a day. Showers were luxuries. Punishment for bad behavior was standing out in the sun for two hours.

The Palestinian Red Crescent Society brought mattresses and food. But worried parents had no way of checking on them until the boys appeared in court.

On April 8, the youths received sentences of between 2 and 3 1/2 months for throwing stones. But they were released a week later. No reason was given, but attorney Quzmar, who handled the boys’ cases, said he thinks that the early releases were to relieve jail overcrowding.

Mohammed Barghouti, a soft-spoken youth with a Che Guevara T-shirt on his slender frame, said he regretted having thrown the rocks.

Zahran, his friend, agreed. “It was a terrible experience,” he said. “I don’t think we want to go through it again.”

Their aversion is exactly what the Israeli government wants to hear -- and what it says justifies its policies.

But Quzmar, who has handled dozens of cases of detained juveniles, says deterrence is not always the outcome when youths are dealt with aggressively.

“I argue the opposite. I believe that if they arrest them and don’t mistreat them and release them after a day or two, maybe with a suspended sentence, this is better than ... interrogating them or putting them together with adults who are in prison on more serious charges,” he said. “When that happens, the child never forgets and develops a hatred of the occupation.”

A few days after the three teenagers from Deir Abu Mishal were released, three young Jewish settlers were accused of assaulting soldiers who tried to roust them from land they had tried to claim near the West Bank city of Hebron. The youths shoved the soldiers, who arrested them.

There was no interrogation, no jail time. The three juveniles, all under 18, were released the same day on bond and banned from the area for two weeks.

Human rights groups say they do not want total leniency toward young offenders -- just consistency in the treatment of Israelis and Palestinians.

“It doesn’t mean you should release everyone who’s age 17 and do nothing with them. You just have to deal with them differently from how you deal with adults,” said Stein of B’Tselem, the rights organization.

“Eighteen is the internationally recognized age for [adulthood]. If you draw the line, you should have the same line” for everyone, she said.