ISRAEL continued its war on Palestinian youth on Sunday, with the arrest of a thirteen-year-old boy in occupied East Jerusalem.
Israeli forces detained the child after allegedly finding a weapon in his possession, amid an ongoing crackdown on Palestinian children in the city, and following the passage of Israeli legislation permitting the imprisonment of Palestinians as young as twelve years old.
An Israeli police spokesperson said that they found the weapons in the boy’s room when they ransacked the educational institution he had been staying in. The incident came amid a sharp escalation of arrests in occupied East Jerusalem over alleged criminal offenses and ‘disturbances’ – particularly stone throwing targeting Israeli settlers and security forces in the area.
At the end of July, 700 Israeli police officers arrested 52 Palestinians, overwhelmingly youth and including eleven minors, in East Jerusalem in a mass raid. This draconian action takes place against the background of the passing of the ‘Youth Bill’ by Israel’s Knesset last Wednesday, targeting Palestinian Jerusalemite youth younger than 14 for prison sentences.
Israeli rights group B’Tselem responded to the new legislation in a statement, saying: ‘Rather than sending them to prison, Israel would be better off sending them to school where they could grow up in dignity and freedom, not under occupation.’
According to the Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI), proposals are also under way to allow Israeli authorities to hand down life sentences to even younger children. According to rights group Defence for Children International – Palestine (DCIP), out of 65 cases documented in 2015, ‘more than a third of Jerusalem youth were arrested at night (38.5 per cent), the vast majority (87.7 per cent) were restrained during arrest, and only a slim minority of children (10.8 per cent) had a parent or lawyer present during interrogation.’
According to affidavits taken by DCIP in a recent report, during the latest arrests and sentencing of Palestinian minors for rock throwing, two of the teenagers ‘both had maintained their innocence and confessed only after they had experienced physical and psychological abuse.’
The night before, Israeli occupation forces arrested eight Palestinians around East Jerusalem and the West Bank. The Palestinian Prisoner’s Society (PPS) said in a statement that two were detained in Beit Awwa village in the southern West Bank region around Hebron (al-Khalil), and identified them as Diya Masalma and Muntaser Naser Masalma.
An Israeli military source said that one of the detained in Beit Awwa was a youth who had thrown a Molotov cocktail at an Israeli settler’s car. PPS identified three total detained from the Hebron area in addition to the two in Beit Awwa: Rajaee Nafiz Jaber, 25, Nihad Mousa Omr, 66, and Mohammad Fared Alrajee, 23.
In the southern district of Bethlehem, a Palestinian was detained in the village of al-Khader, identified by PPS as Yousif Sayil, 26. According to the military, another Palestinian was detained in the village of al-Ubeidiya, identified by PPS as 33-year-old Muneer Mohammad Shanayta.
Israeli forces also detained a Palestinian in al-Eizariya in the central occupied West Bank district of Jerusalem. PPS identified three total detained from the Hebron area in addition to the two in Beit Awwa: Rajaee Nafiz Jaber, 25, Nihad Mousa Omr, 66, and Mohammad Fared Alrajee, 23. PPS also said that Luay Abu Alsaad, a Palestinian security guard at the Al-Aqsa Mosque in occupied East Jerusalem, was also detained.
Israeli forces conducted a weekly average of 81 search and detention operations across the occupied territory since the beginning of the year, with 135 raids being carried just last week, according to UN documentation. Also on Saturday night, several Palestinians were injured during clashes with Israeli soldiers when they raided the villages of Beita and Burin in the Nablus district of the northern West Bank.
Palestinians reported that at least three Palestinians were injured in Beita, when Israeli forces fired tear gas bombs and rubber bullets – weapons which have frequently proved fatal, leading to many Palestinian deaths on demonstrations and during raids – at them. The three were reported as moderately injured and taken to the hospital, where their conditions were later reported as being stable, whilst others were treated with first aid at the scene by Palestinian Red Crescent crews.
A resident of Beita was also reportedly detained by Israeli forces during the clashes, but was later released. Local sources said that Israeli forces raided the village and fired tear gas at residents during clashes that lasted for two hours. There is no such thing as easy sleep for Palestinians living under the occupation, as Israeli soldiers may make night-time raids at any time in any part of the West Bank and East Jerusalem.
• On the other side of Palestine, in the besieged Gaza Strip, Israeli forces on Sunday opened gunfire at Palestinian farmers east of Khan Younes, in the south of the coastal enclave. Israeli soldiers stationed in military watchtowers along Israel’s border fence opened gunfire at the farmers as they were cultivating their lands.
Although no injuries were reported, the farmers had to quickly evacuate their land. The Israeli military frequently fires on anything which moves within a certain distance of its border fence – which adds up to over 10% of the land of the small, densely-populated Gaza Strip, rendered effectively useless because it is too dangerous to venture there.
Meanwhile, Israeli gunboats targeted with gunfire several Palestinian fishermen while they were sailing offshore Gaza, causing damage to at least one of their boats. There were no reports of injuries among the fishermen, who reportedly fled back to shore for fear of injury or arrest by Israel’s navy. Israel’s firing on fishing boats is a blatant violation of the ceasefire between Israel and the Palestinian factions reached in August 2014 after the 51-day-long bombing of Gaza that summer.
That deal stipulated a six nautical mile zone which fishermen could use, which would expand gradually over time – but just as Israel has broken the ceasefire time after time by firing into Gaza and launching airstrikes into the strip, so it has violated this aspect. Hamas, the Islamic movement which has its administration in the Gaza Strip, on the other hand, has not officially claimed responsibility for any military action from Gaza against Israel since the 2014 war.
A member of Hamas’ military wing the Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades died on Saturday evening in a tunnel collapse, the group said in a statement. Khaled Methqal al-Hour, 23, from the Bureij refugee camp in central Gaza, was reportedly carrying out a military training exercise when the tunnel collapsed.
The incident marked the third tunnel collapse in the Gaza Strip over the past month.
The tunnels supply highly-demanded necessities for Gazans – who have been trapped under Israeli siege for a decade – including food, medicine and much-needed infrastructure materials. It was reported in 2014 that there had been 400 deaths in tunnel collapses by that date.
Israel and neighbouring Egypt under the al-Sisi regime have both worked hard to locate and destroy the tunnels into Gaza, making life even more desperate for the Palestinians trapped there.
