The Israeli occupation forces have arrested more than 400 Palestinian children since the beginning of this year until the end of last October, most of them from Jerusalem.
On the occasion of the International Children´s Day, which falls on November 20 of each year, the same date on which the United Nations General Assembly adopted the Convention on the Rights of the Child in 1959 and the Convention on the Rights of the Child in 1989, the prisoner club said in a report. (170) Palestinian children, who were arrested by the Israeli occupation authorities and detained in three central prisons: "Megiddo, Ofer, and Damon."
He stressed that the occupation authorities are continuing to carry out arrests of children and impose more abusive measures against them, despite the continuing spread of the "Corona" virus, as child prisoners face a double isolation process like adults, and they are denied access to their families and lawyers, especially in the first months of the outbreak .
The Prisoners Club reviewed, through a fact sheet, a number of violations and transformations carried out by the occupation against child prisoners, which are the majority of them being arrested from their homes late at night, transporting them to interrogation and arrest centers, and keeping them without food or drink for long hours. And directing insults and profanity at them, threatening and intimidating them, to extract confessions from them, pushing them to sign statements written in the Hebrew language without translating them, and depriving them of their legal right to have a parent and lawyer present during the investigation, and other methods and violations, including depriving them of completing their studies.
Since 2015, the issue of child prisoners has witnessed transformations that are still continuing, especially during the period of the gift of Jerusalem, including the occupation authorities ’approval of racist laws, and the move towards draft laws that legislate the issuance of high judgments against children, in some cases reaching more than ten years, and even Life sentence, and from the aforementioned year until October of this year, cases of detention among children reached more than 7,000.
Children, especially in occupied Jerusalem, face systematic arrests, which have had disastrous effects on their fate, through systematic policies to destroy the structure of Jerusalem´s society, including targeting child prisoners, with the policy of "home confinement" that affected hundreds of child prisoners over the past years, and constituted the most dangerous policies that Imposed on them, by turning their homes into a prison.
The prisoner club called on international human rights institutions to make serious efforts to protect Palestinian children, foremost among which is the United Nations Children´s Fund, "UNICEF", to oblige the occupation to all of the conventions and laws for protecting children.
