WEST BANK (Dispatches) – The Zionist regime has detained over 9,300 Palestinian minors in the past eight years, a local nongovernmental organization (NGO) says.
In a statement marking World Children’s Day, the Palestinian Prisoners Society NGO said Zionist troops rounded up 750 minors in 2022.
“Around 160 children are still in Israeli custody,” the statement said.
According to the NGO, eight minors, including three girls, are held by the regime’s policy of so-called administrative detention, which allows the arrest of Palestinians without charge or trial.
“Children are subject to all forms of systematic abuses, including torture,” the statement said.
In 1990, the United Nations set November 20 to celebrate World Children’s Day to commemorate the adoption of the Declaration of the Rights of the Child in 1959.
The so-called administrative detainees are arrested on “secret evidence”, unaware of the accusations against them, and are not allowed to defend themselves in court. They are usually held for renewable six-month periods, often leading to years in detention.
The Palestinian Prisoners Society (PPS) noted that most of the children have been subjected to all forms of physical and psychological torture during their detention in violation of international agreements and conventions on the rights of children.
The advocacy group highlighted that a Zionist court is also going to put 14-year-old Hussein Zubeidat, a resident of Bani Na’im town in the southern West Bank, on trial.
It added that Zubeidat, a ninth-grade student, was detained when he was near the illegal Kiryat Arba settlement in the occupied city of Al-Khalil. Zionist troops beat and stripped him of his clothes and published pictures and a video of the child without his clothes.
Meanwhile, the Colonization and Wall Resistance Commission said in a monthly report that the regime’s army troops and extremist settlers carried out 1,197 assaults against Palestinians across the occupied West Bank in October.
The commission noted that Al-Khalil witnessed the highest number of Israeli attacks, followed by Nablus and Ramallah.
Zionist settlers committed 254 assaults in October, which marks a record high compared to previous months, according to the commission’s director Muayyad Shaaban.