The Brainerd Dispatch · Brainerd, Minnesota · 17 April 2003
CP-2003-004
Hundreds of Palestinian minors in Israeli custody
Jason Keyser, The Associated Press, Jerusalem
Shown from the top. The whole column — 8.5 times taller than it is wide — is in the enlargement.
Transcribed from the clipping
“JERUSALEM — About 300 Palestinian minors have been rounded up in Israeli army sweeps over the past year and are being held in crowded lockups, some without charges, lawyers and human rights monitors say.
The army acknowledges it has locked up teens, but treats those over 16 as adults, despite international conventions defining minors warranting special treatment as those under 18. Israel says militant groups often recruit teens, pointing to a 16-year-old suicide bomber, Issa Bdair from Bethlehem, who killed two Israelis in a blast in Tel Aviv last year.
Several other bombers have been minors. Roundups of Palestinians have intensified in the past year, and the International Committee of the Red Cross says a total of 7,600 Palestinians are currently in custody.
Red Cross officials say they have visited 260 minors in Israeli lockups… A 14-year-old, Ali Rahman, said he was jailed for eight days after throwing a stone at an army jeep that drove past his home in the Aida refugee camp in Bethlehem. Ali said he slept on a floor with a blanket, sharing a cell with 15 other boys at the West Bank’s Etzion military detention center.
Israeli human rights lawyer Tamar Peleg represents several Palestinian teens, including Mohammed Najar from Bethlehem who was first arrested when he was 15… Najar is being held in so-called administrative detention, a practice held over from British Mandate rule that allows the army to jail Palestinians without trial or charges… Israel is in violation of the U.N.
Convention on the Rights of the Child, which defines minors as younger than 18, said Jessica Montell, director of B’tselem. The treaty, which Israel signed and ratified, says the arrest and imprisonment of children should be a last resort and for the shortest appropriate time, and they should not be jailed with adults.”
Context added by this archive
Both arguments inside one dispatch, including the Israeli one, named and dated. Two of the children are named and their ages given, and so is the Israeli lawyer acting for them.
Cite this clipping
"Hundreds of Palestinian minors in Israeli custody," The Brainerd Dispatch, 17 April 2003, p. 1. Covering Palestine archive, CP-2003-004. https://coveringpalestine.org/archive/cp-2003-004
This clipping is read closely in the section below
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In these collections
Last updated 2 November 2026
This record is part of Covering Palestine, an archive of American newspaper clippings about Palestinians, 1724 to 2023. Researched and assembled by Maria Robles.
The clipping belongs to the newspaper that printed it, or to the news agency that supplied the copy. It is reproduced here for research, criticism and commentary. A city here is where the newspaper was published, not where the story came from, and on most records it was taken from the masthead.
Something wrong here, or something you know about this clipping? The archive is still being built and corrections are wanted: maria@rozumstudio.com, quoting CP-2003-004.
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