These

vivid details emerged recently in a report based on the testimonies of
more than 300 Palestinian children, which were collected over four
years. The study by Defence for Children International, Bound, Blindfolded and Convicted: Children Held in
Military Detention highlights a pattern of abuse towards
children detained under the Israeli military court system. In the past
11 years, DCI estimates that around 7,500 children, some as young as
12, have been detained, interrogated and imprisoned within this system.
This is about 500-700 children per year, or nearly two children every
day.

Mohammad

S, from the northern West Bank town of Tulkarem, was 16 when he was
arrested, according to the report. It was 2:30am when Israeli soldiers
dragged him out of bed. He was blindfolded and verbally abused and
taken to an unknown destination, where he says he was forced to lay
down in the cold for an hour. He was later taken to an interrogation
centre near Nablus at around 11am, and only then was he allowed to
drink some water and use the bathroom, after he underwent a strip
search. Tied and blindfolded still, he was then taken to Al Jalameh,
near Haifa in Israel. There he was taken to Cell 36, where he was
forced to spend his first night sleeping on the floor because there was
no mattress or blanket.

Mohammad

says he spent 17 days in solitary confinement in Cell 36 and Cell 37,
interrupted only by interrogations. Mohammad was reportedly
interrogated for two to three hours every day, while sitting on a low
seat with his hands tied to the chair.

Specifically,

Israeli children have access to a lawyer within 48 hours and those
under the age of 14 cannot be imprisoned. Palestinian children,
however, can be jailed even if they are as young as 12 and, like
adults, can be held in jail without having formal charges against them
for up to 188 days.

"They

have completely different rights. It's hard to justify this after 45
years of occupation. It's not a question of whether offences are
committed. What we are saying is children should not be treated
completely differently."

Because

children are often taken late at night, they are driven to the nearest
settlement to wait until Israeli police interrogators open up shop in
the morning. This means children are sometimes placed out in the cold
or rain for many hours. Requests for water or using the bathroom are
most often denied, and children are taken straight to interrogation
after a night of little sleep.

That's

what Ahmad F said happened to him. A 15-year-old from 'Iraq Burin
village, just outside Nablus, he was arrested in July 2011. He was
taken to the nearby Huwwara interrogation centre, where he was left
outside from 5am until 3pm. At one point, soldiers brought a dog. "They
brought the dog's food and put it on my head," Ahmad told DCI. "Then
they put another piece of bread on my trousers near my genitals, so I
tried to move away but [the dog] started barking. I was terrified."

During

interrogation, many children reported being facing with slurs and
threatened with physical violence. In a small number of cases,
interrogators have reportedly threatened minors with rape.

After

children sign a "confession", they are brought before an Israeli
military court. Since 2009, an Israeli spokesperson said, children have
faced juvenile military courts. Most often, that's the first time the
minor will see their lawyer. The confession is generally the primary
evidence against the child, say DCI officials. Other evidence will
often consist of a statement by an interrogator, and sometimes a
soldier.

Because

so few are granted bail, children face a legal dilemma: they can ask
the lawyer to challenge the system - and by doing so potentially wait,
locked up, for four to six months - or plead guilty and get a two or
three month prison sentence for a "first offence".

According

to DCI, some fifty to sixty per cent of the time, children are taken to
prisons inside Israel, making it difficult for parents to visit. "Some
parents are denied permits on unspecified 'security grounds'. For the
others, the bureaucracy can take up to two months to get a permit,
which means if their children are sentenced to less time, they will not
receive a visit," Horton said. "However, some permits are processed in
less than two months, and those children sentenced to more time will
also generally receive visits."

Israel's

practice of holding children "for substantial periods in solitary
confinement would, if it occurred, be capable of amounting to torture",
the report concluded. Of all the children represented by DCI, 12 per
cent reported being held in solitary confinement for an average of 11
days.

Speaking to Al Jazeera, an Israeli spokesperson accused the
DCI report of bias, and refuted the group's finding that the majority
of children prosecuted were charged with throwing stones: "This was the
basis for only 40 per cent of the indictments filed against minors in
the West Bank ... the young age of offenders is not relevant to the
gravity of the act: it has been proven beyond doubt that a stone thrown
by a 15-year-old child can be no less fatal than a stone thrown by an
adult."

Stone-throwing can prove deadly, stressed the spokesperson,
citing a case from September 2011, when an Israeli settler and his
one-year-old son were killed after their car overturned as a result of
stones hurled at them. "Two Palestinians from Halhul confessed to
throwing the stone which caused the deaths of Asher and Yonatan. The
stone was hurled from a driving car," the spokesperson said. The
official said that children were also involved in grenade throwing, the
use of explosives, shooting and assault

The spokesperson also denied that the ISA used isolation as an
interrogation technique or as punishment to exert confessions out of
minors. "There are certain cases in which an interrogee will be held
alone for a few days at the most, in order to prevent information in
his/her possession from leaking to other terrorist activists in the
same detention facility, which could compromise the interrogation of
the suspect. Note that even in these cases, the interrogee is not held
in absolute confinement, but is entitled to meet with Red Cross
representatives, medical staff etc."

Furthermore, the spokesperson rejected the idea that pleading
guilty was the quickest way out of the system for a defendant, deeming
the accusation "misleading, distorted, and premised upon incorrect
information".

"Should a minor defendant choose to plead 'not guilty' and
challenge the prosecutorial evidence by proceeding to a full trial and
mounting a good-faith defence, military courts will, in the vast
majority of the cases, conduct the hearings very efficiently, sometimes
even in a few weeks."

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