On This Day in 2009: When Palestinian children returned to school for the first day of classes since Israel’s deadly assault on Gaza ended, not all pupils showed up. Some students had to be excused for not attending after being killed by the Israeli army during its three-week bombing campaign of the besieged strip.
Over 300 Palestinian children were killed in ‘Operation Cast Lead’ — between 27 December 2008 and 18 January 2009 — which took the lives of over 1,400 Palestinians in total.
Signs replaced the once-occupied seats at al-Fakhura School in the Jabaliya refugee camp in Gaza; names of victims written under the word in red: ‘Martyr’, 24 January, 2009.
(Photo: Anja Niedringhaus / AP)
On this day in 2004: British student Tom Hurndall dies from his wounds after being shot directly in the head by an Israeli sniper for attempting to carry Palestinian children out of the line of fire
Hurndall was unarmed and wearing the internationally recognized peaceworker’s fluorescent orange jacket. He was struck down on 11 April 2003 and never regained consciousness. He died nine months later at a London hospital on 13 January 2004.
The sniper who pulled the trigger, an award-winning marksman whose rifle had telescopic sight, admitted that a policy of shooting at unarmed civilians existed at the time.
(Photos: Tom Hurndall Foundation)
On This Day — January 3, 2009: An Israeli airstrike hits the Ibrahim al-Maqadna mosque in Gaza during the busy period of evening prayers where several hundred male and female worshippers congregated, killing at least 13 Palestinians, six of whom were children.
Fdil Sobih, 40, an ambulance driver who was one of the first people to arrive at the scene, told the Observer that the sight outside the Ibrahim al-Maqadna mosque was horrific, and was made worse by the desperation of locals trying to dig out those buried under the rubble with their hands. “I saw people cut to pieces,” he said. “No one expected this here. The mosque is a few hundred metres from the hospital and it is heavily populated and is surrounded by houses.
Astonishingly, Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs claimed in a 2009 report (“The operation in Gaza: Factual and legal aspects”) that “the mosque was not attacked at all” and that “the supposed “civilians” who were casualties of the attack were in fact Hamas operatives killed while fighting against the IDF.”
The ministry tracked back on their comments in a later report (“Gaza Operation Investigations: Second Update”) after this incident — among many others — was brought to the world’s attention by the UN’s fact finding mission, which concluded that the attack was a deliberate targeting of civilians.
Photo: The bodies of two Palestinian children killed in the Israeli airstrike lie next to each other in the mortuary of a hospital in Beit Lahia in the northern Gaza Strip on January 3, 2008. (Getty Images / Reuters)
On This Day — December 27, 2008: Israel started its bombing campaign on Gaza without warning, killing 1,400 Palestinians in total — more than 300 of whom were children — in the space of 22 days. Palestinian armed groups responded, killing 3 Israeli civilians and 6 Israeli soldiers.
Israel stated that the aim of their mission — also known as Operation Cast Lead — was to halt rocket fire from Gaza, despite provoking Hamas by killing 6 of their members in a raid that ended a four-month ceasefire.
Photo: A Palestinian girl wounded by an Israeli airstrike during Operation Cast Lead screams as she is carried into the al-Shifa hospital in Gaza, January 1, 2009. (Getty Images)
Above: Aviva (R), Noam (2nd-R) and Yoel (C) Shalit, parents and brother of Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit who was captured in 2006 by Hamas-allied militants in the Gaza Strip, attend the Kabbalat Shabbat (Welcoming the Sabbath) Jewish ritual on June 24, 2011 at the family’s protest tent as they mark his 1,825th day (5th year) in captivity outside Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s residence in Jerusalem.
Below: A portrait of French-Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit is displayed in front of the Paris cityhall on June 25, 2011 to mark the 5th anniversary of his captivity (1,825th day). The poster reads: ‘Paris is mobilized for Guilad Shalit’s liberation, hostage since five years’. (Getty Images)
Shalit remains the single Israeli in Palestinian captivity and according to the Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories, B’Tselem, around 5,500 Palestinians are being held in Israel — around 200 of them children — say the Geneva-based Defense for Children International, which works closely with the U.N. and European states.
Does Israel Mistreat Palestinian Child Prisoners?
TIME — Walid Abu Obeida, a 13-year-old Palestinian farm boy from the West Bank village of Ya’abad, had never spoken to an Israeli until he rounded a corner at dusk carrying his shopping bags and found two Israeli soldiers waiting with their rifles aimed at him. “They accused me of throwing stones at them,” recounts Walid, a skinny kid with dark eyes. “Then one of them smacked me in the face, and my nose started bleeding.”
According to Walid, the two soldiers blindfolded and handcuffed him, dragged him to a jeep and drove away. All that his family would know about their missing son was that his shopping bags with meat and rice for that evening’s dinner were found in the dusty road near an olive grove. Over the course of several days in April last year, the boy says he was moved from an army camp to a prison, where he was crammed into a cell with five other children, cursed at and humiliated by the guards and beaten by his interrogator until he confessed to stone-throwing.
Walid says he saw his parents for only five seconds when he was brought before an Israeli military court and accused by the uniformed prosecutor not only of throwing stones but of “striking an Israeli officer.” The military judge ignored the latter charge and chose to prosecute Walid only for allegedly heaving a stone at soldiers.
The boy got off lightly: he spent 28 days in prison and was fined 500 shekels (approximately $120). Under Israeli military law, which prevails in the Palestinian territories, the crime of throwing a stone at an Israeli solider or even at the monolithic 20-ft.-high “security barrier” enclosing much of the West Bank can carry a maximum 20-year-prison sentence. Since 2000, according to the Palestinian Ministry for Prisoner Affairs, more than 6,500 children have been arrested, mostly for hurling rocks.
Walid’s story is hardly unusual, judging from a report on the Israeli military-justice system in the West Bank compiled by the Palestine office of the Geneva-based Defense for Children International, which works closely with the U.N. and European states. Human-rights groups in Israel and elsewhere have also condemned the punishment meted out to Palestinian children by Israeli military justice. Most onerous, says Sarit Michaeli of the Israeli human-rights group B’Tselem, is that inside the territories, the Israeli military deems any Palestinian who is 16 years and older as an adult, while inside Israel, the U.S. and most other countries, adulthood is reached at age 18.
The report states that “the ill-treatment and torture” of Palestinian child prisoners “appears to be widespread, systematic and institutionalized, suggesting complicity at all levels of the political and military chain of command.” The group’s director, Rifaat Kassis, says the number of child arrests rose sharply in the past six months, possibly because of a crackdown on Palestinian protests in the West Bank in the aftermath of Israel’s military offensive in Gaza.
The Geneva organization’s report alleges that under Israeli military justice, it is the norm for children to be interrogated by the Israeli police and army without either a lawyer or a family member present and that most of their convictions are due to confessions extracted during interrogation sessions or from “secret evidence,” usually tip-offs from unnamed Palestinian informers. If so, the practice may violate the U.N. Convention Against Torture, which Israel ratified in 1991. In response to TIME’s queries, a lawyer for the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said that under “security legislation” and Israel’s interpretation of international law, no lawyer or relative need be present during a child’s interrogation.
The children’s rights defenders collected testimony from 33 minors, including a child identified merely as “Ezzat H.,” who described a “soldier wearing black sunglasses [who] came into the room where I was held and pointed his rifle at me. The rifle barrel was a few centimeters from my face. I was so terrified that I started to shiver. He made fun of me and said: ‘Shivering? Tell me where the [father’s hidden] pistol is before I shoot you.’ ” According to the report, Ezzat was 10 years old at the time. TIME asked the IDF to comment on the specific incidents mentioned in the report, but a spokesman said that would be impossible without knowing the names of the soldiers allegedly involved.
Often, children suffer lasting traumas from jail. Says Saleh Nazzal of the Palestinian Ministry of Prisoner Affairs: “When soldiers burst into a house and drag away a child, he loses his feeling of being protected by his family. He comes back from prison alienated from his family, his friends. They don’t like going back to school or even leaving the house. They start wetting their beds.” Says Mona Zaghrout, a YMCA counselor who helps kids returning from prison: “They come out of prison thinking and acting like they are men. Their childhood is gone.” And they often turn to another father figure — the armed militant groups fighting the Israeli occupation.
According to the Israeli human-rights group Breaking the Silence, a few Israeli soldiers are alarmed by their own troops’ behavior. The group cites the testimony of two officers who complained before a military court that during an operation last March in Hares village, soldiers herded 150 male villagers, some as young as 14, into a schoolyard in the middle of the night, where they were kept bound, blindfolded and beaten over the course of more than 12 hours.
A U.N. Committee Against Torture, which met on May 15 in Geneva, expressed its “concern” over Israel’s alleged abuses of Palestinian child prisoners. The IDF denies any ill treatment of children detainees and insists that all claims are thoroughly investigated and that the number of complaints has dropped. But Khalid Quzman, a defense lawyer at the Israeli military courts, says, “We don’t complain anymore because it’s a waste of time.” More than 600 complaints of torture and ill treatment were filed between 2001 and 2008, he says, “and not a single criminal investigation was ever carried out.”
Inculcating respect for an occupying force is, of course, a difficult task under any circumstances. In the case of the Palestinians, history and society have made hatred for Israel almost an instinct. Still, there was shock in June among Palestinians when members of a West Bank family were accused of hanging a boy for suspected collaboration with Israeli forces.
Israel’s treatment of Palestinian children and teens as combatants perpetuates the cycle of hatred. After a spell in an Israeli jail, it’s hard for a young Palestinian to stay uninvolved. Walid says he never cared much for anything aside from his school friends and family before his incarceration. Now he bears a radioactive hatred towards Israelis. “The soldiers’ curses and insults, I’ll carry them to my grave,” he says. — With reporting by Jamil Hamad / Hebron and Yonit Farago / Jerusalem
