Israel must be committing a multitude of atrocities against Palestinian children for it to be hit by two damning UN reports on the issue in the span of just three months. In March, in a 22-page report, UNICEF qualified the ill-treatment of Palestinian minors held within the Israeli military detention system as "widespread, systematic and institutionalized”. This week, the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child said it expressed its "deepest concern about the reported practice of torture and ill-treatment of Palestinian children arrested, prosecuted and detained by the military and the police”. The two reports, while similar in nature, differ in the details. When examining the Israeli military court system for holding Palestinian children, UNICEF found evidence of practices it said were "cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment or punishment." It said soldiers arrested Palestinian youths regularly during night-time raids, tying the hands of children painfully and blindfolding them, and often transferring them to detention centers without informing their parents. It also said that arrested Palestinian children were subjected systematically to physical and verbal abuse, threatened with death, physical violence, and sexual assault against themselves or members of their family, as well as having access restricted to toilets, food and water - all this done many times to obtain a confession. Meanwhile, minors are systematically subjected to physical and verbal abuse, threatened with death, physical violence and sexual assault, said the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child. The body attested that Palestinian children arrested by Israeli military and police are systematically subject to degrading treatment, and often to acts of torture, are interrogated in Hebrew, a language they do not understand, and sign confessions in Hebrew in order to be released. It said that an estimated 7,000 children aged from 12 to 17, but sometimes as young as nine, have been arrested, interrogated and detained since 2002 – an astonishing average of two per day. And usually their biggest offense is throwing stones at Israeli forces and settlers, and while stones can be lethal, they are not semi-automatics, and being given 20 years for throwing stones is disproportionate punishment. The two reports might be overlapping, and Israel has said as much. But obviously it did not take the first report seriously. Speaking in March, spokesman Yigal Palmor said Israel would study the UNICEF conclusions – which included 38 recommendations for improving the protection of children - and will work to implement them through ongoing cooperation. However, Israel has not followed through on any kind of cooperation with UNICEF. If Israel had in the last three months done anything to clean up its act, a second indictment on children by the same organization would not have come hot on the heels of the first. Israel will accuse the UN of being biased toward it, a charge it has forever leveled against the world body. But why doesn't Israel admit that the UN speaks the truth, that the two UN bodies did not pull their information out of thin air or rely on hearsay, that they obtained their information from other UN rights bodies, military sources and Israeli and Palestinian rights groups. Israel, it should be pointed out, did not cooperate with requests for information on the issue. Israel has not perpetrated such crimes overnight; the findings cover the past 10 years. One more frightening factor can be inferred from these findings: If this is the way Israel treats Palestinian children, one can only imagine, and maybe cannot imagine, how Palestinian adults are treated.
