Police interrogate two Palestinian children detained last week

Israeli police interrogated two of the five children detained last week for allegedly trespassing in the Havat Main outpost in the South Hebron Hills region of the West Bank, according to the left-wing NGO B’Tselem.

It’s unclear if charges will be brought against them for trespassing and/or for allegedly attempting to steal a parrot.

The story of the five children made headlines last week because of dramatic video footage and photographs of the incident, in which the IDF can be seen forcibly removing the boys ages 8 to 13 from the area of the outpost.

The boys were then taken to the police station in Kiryat Arba and released to their parents.

Police have insisted that the boys were taken into protective custody and that it took hours to locate their parents.

On Sunday, the two older boys in the group, one aged 13 and the other 12 returned with their parents to answer police questions about the incident. They were represented in the questioning by Israeli human rights attorney Gaby Lasky.

Already last week, Lasky wrote to the attorney-general of the IDF forces in Judea and Samaria to protest against the treatment of the children, particularly given that three of the boys were younger than 12.

Under Israeli and military law, children under 12 cannot be arrested.

These children were initially “illegally detained and questioned without their parents,” Lasky told The Jerusalem Post on Monday.

In light of the non-serious nature of the situation, the boys were unnecessarily traumatized by the soldiers’ actions, Lasky said.

According to settlers, the boys entered the yard of a home in the outpost. Lasky, however, contends that the boys were picking wild, edible artichokes near the outpost when settlers began screaming at them and called the IDF. B’Tselem has video footage of them picking the artichokes.

The army came and detained the five children, Lasky said, initially questioning them at the outpost and then handing them over to the police.

The boys were held for five-and-ahalf hours, she said.

Lasky said that the situation was absurd, given that the outpost was illegally built and that the settlers had no legal right to be there. Yet now the Palestinian boys, who were simply in the area, could face charges of trespassing into an illegal community, she said.