Palestinian children show steely resolve

Minors are held without trial, tortured, humiliated by Israeli forces, but their spirit can never be broken

In the month of June alone, soldiers from Israel’s occupation force have rounded up and jailed 31 Palestinian children, holding them in regime prison cells, interrogating them and subjecting them to mistreatment in a process that combines an abrogation of human rights and administrative cruelty on unprotected and vulnerable minors. And while 17-year-old resistance hero Ahed Tamimi is now back with her family after spending the past eight months in a regime jail cell, the plight of these 31 children snatched in June, along with thousands more seized since 2000, needs to be highlighted.

Imagine the terror felt by a boy or girl picked up by fully armed regime soldiers who fire live rounds at will and kill without any legal recourse or moral compunction. The fear of the unknown for an adult seized by regime soldiers is terrifying. For children, the experience is life-altering, one that exposes their young minds and bodies to a litany of state-sanctioned terror and administrative abuses.

Sadly, this brutalisation by regime forces is commonplace, and Palestinian human rights’ actvitists say there are some 290 children right now in Israeli jails, with a further 2,000 having been lifted and imprisoned since the turn of the millennium.

The reality is that the occupation regime is a law unto itself, one where prisoners are held without trial, without the right to bail, and where guilt is assumed over innocence. Rolling administrative detention orders are a daily occurrence, and so too are beatings and other mistreatment of prisoners incarcerated for protesting the illegality of that regime in the first instance.

The Israeli jailers too treat these minors as if they were adults, imposing solitary confinement in dark, segregated cells under strict disciplinary conditions that would indeed test the resolve of adults, never mind children.

The young detainees are held without any contact from their parents, isolated, and treated as if they are the lowest of the low. If the Israelis are intent on breaking the will of these young children, they should be fully aware that the spirit of every Palestinian is only made stronger knowing how children are mistreated and abused.

There is a reality too, that these children learn a hard lesson in what it means to be a Palestinian, and what it means to endure and suffer for a homeland that will one day be restored and where the forces of occupation will be held to account for their human rights abuses. It is a lesson that merely strengthens their resolve to resist.