Lebanon Daily News · Lebanon, Pennsylvania · 24 February 2016

CP-2016-001

Palestinian children join attacks on Israel

Most of those detained, some as young as 11, are denied bail

Asma’ Jawabreh and Jacob Wirtschafter, special for USA Today

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Transcribed from the clipping

“HEBRON, West Bank - Amer Salah was sleeping last May when Israeli forces entered the 14-year-old’s bedroom in the middle of the night. He said he was arrested for throwing stones at vehicles of neighboring Jewish settlers, which he denied, and was jailed with nine other kids in a cell barely 6-feet by 6-feet without fresh air or ample light.

‘We were not even allowed to see the sun,’ he said… The arrests have multiplied since a spate of stabbings and other assaults last fall over Israel’s continued occupation of the West Bank. On Thursday, two 14-year-old Palestinian boys stabbed an Israeli soldier to death and wounded a second Israeli man at a supermarket in a Jewish settlement south of Ramallah.

Both teens were wounded by armed bystanders.

Currently, Israel is holding 420 Palestinians under the age of 18 for alleged attacks in East Jerusalem and the West Bank, according to Israeli Prison Service statistics… The youngest is 11-year-old Ali Alqam, who is charged with wounding a security guard in an October knife attack at a Jerusalem light rail station… Figures released by the Israeli court system after a Freedom of Information request by Military Court Watch show that bail is denied to 70 percent of Palestinian youths who are detained… Since early October, Palestinians have stabbed Israeli civilians and soldiers 199 times, shot at them 41 times and rammed vehicles into pedestrians 23 times, according to the Israel Defense Forces… ‘No one is denying that there is a wave of knife attacks and stone throwing, much if conducted by Palestinian youths,’ said Sarit Michaeli, a spokeswoman for B’tselem — the Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories.

‘But even when involved in serious offenses, a child offender is still a child, and the authorities who are entitled to charge and prosecute them still should not violate the rights of children.’”

Context added by this archive

A photograph: one man throwing a stone at an armored vehicle, a soldier walking toward him with a rifle raised.

The pull-quote on the page is from Anat Berko, a member of Israel’s parliament with a doctorate in criminology: “I wish we did not have to put Palestinian minors under 14 in prison. … But there is peer pressure to participate in this violence, and Palestinian leaders need to make it clear that this is not the right way for their youth to achieve a solution to the conflict.”

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• Held without charge, for eighty-four years

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