Five-year-old Wadi'a was arrested in Hebron in the West Bank. Source: News Limited
SITTING in the heavily fortified headquarters of the Israeli army in Tel Aviv a few months ago, we were surrounded by some of the world's most advanced military technology.
Yet it was not the equipment of the most powerful military in the Middle East that went off but my early warning bulldust detector.
The subject of discussion was the Israeli military's treatment of Palestinian children: the army had offered me briefings with three senior officers. I had been writing stories on the subject for The Australian for several years and the army wanted to update me about the issue.
It was all going well until one officer made an absurd comment. Every so often in journalism you hear something that makes you wonder about everything else that person has said. My question had been simple: how many Palestinian children go through Israel's military court each year?
"Unfortunately our computer software cannot distinguish between children and adults," the officer said. "Maybe 200."
The answer was ridiculous: Israel's army and intelligence service know every kilometre of the West Bank. My assessment, based on reliable sources, is that Israel has as many as 20,000 paid Palestinian informants in the West Bank. Israel is also a leader in technology; the notion that its computers were unable to distinguish between detained minors and adults was absurd.
I replied that UNICEF estimated it was about 700 children a year. "That would be right," he agreed instantly.
There is a serious debate in Israel over a policy that is a public relations disaster but that the army supports. The issue is how Palestinian children are treated; last year a UNICEF report concluded that ill-treatment of children by Israeli security forces appeared to be "widespread, systematic and institutionalised". "The interrogation mixes intimidation, threats and physical violence, with the clear purpose of forcing the child to confess," the report found.
"Children are restrained during the interrogation, in some cases to the chair they are sitting on. This sometimes continues for extended periods of time, resulting in pain to their hands, back and legs."
It found that children had been "threatened with death, physical violence, solitary confinement and sexual assault against themselves or a family member" and added: "Most children confess at the end of the interrogation."
The debate is between the Foreign Ministry, which sees the damage the issue is doing to Israel, and the security forces.
Recently The Jerusalem Post revealed that Israel had been keeping Palestinian children in outdoor cages overnight. As part of a joint investigation between The Weekend Australian and the ABC's Four Corners, the office of Justice Minister Tzipi Livni confirmed that Livni had stopped the practice after learning children had been kept in cages, freezing, during snowstorms.
At the heart of the issue is that Israel enforces two legal systems in the West Bank, one for Jews and one for Palestinians. About 2.5 million Palestinians live under Israeli occupation in the West Bank - also known as the Palestinian Territories - which Israel has occupied since 1967.
Palestinian children appear before the military court, while Jewish children face a civil court with full legal protections.
Typically, a Palestinian child is taken by the army in the middle of the night and blindfolded, handcuffed and transported to an unknown location.
Unlike Jewish children, they are not allowed to have a parent or lawyer present; often their parents do not know their whereabouts for weeks.
Palestinian children from the age of 12 are often sentenced to three months' imprisonment while a Jewish child cannot go to prison until 14 and jail for them is rare. Palestinian children often say they are not allowed food, water or to go to the toilet.
Israeli lawyer Gaby Lasky wants Palestinian children to have the same rights as Jewish children.
"Military courts are the long arm of occupation," she says. "We're not talking about courts of justice, we are talking about courts of occupation."
She adds: "Children are not part of the conflict; they shouldn't be part of the conflict."
Lasky says some children serve three months in an army jail for throwing stones at Israel's security barrier. While injuries from stone-throwing are rare, they can be horrendous. I visited in hospital Adele Biton, a three-year-old Israeli girl from a settlement who has head injuries from Palestinian youths throwing rocks at her car. Adele's mother, Adva, said: "I don't think it's fair for her to sleep here in the bed and not do things like children her age." But Adva says the law should be the same for Palestinians and Jews: "For both, because we need to highlight that stones kill," she says.
Lieutenant Colonel Maurice Hirsh, the Israeli army officer who oversees prosecutions, says: "Her three-year-old child is basically still in hospital and it's unlikely that she will recover from that event. That is terrorism."
Even though officially the law is much harsher for Palestinians, it's the apparent laxity in enforcing laws on Jewish settlers that also fuels anger. While thousands of Palestinian children have been imprisoned for stone-throwing - some in solitary confinement - a case last year made many wonder about the system.
Jewish youths firebombed a Palestinian taxi, injuring six members of one family, including two children. Haaretz newspaper described it as one of the most severe cases of violence carried out by settlers against Palestinians. Despite DNA evidence of one of the settlers being found at the scene, the paper reported that authorities closed the case "after months of foot-dragging".
Cases of settlers attacking Palestinians with impunity are frequent. As former Israeli army commander Yehuda Shaul says: "When we see settlers attacking a Palestinian, our orders are not to intervene."
The Israeli Foreign Ministry's Yigal Palmor says the abuses highlighted by UNICEF are "intolerable". "Basically I think that the question of the arrests is a question that needs to be addressed because once you send soldiers and not policemen to arrest people the whole attitude will be different," he says. "So we need to train soldiers to behave as policemen and that is something that's not so easy."
But the army says the system is working. "I think that the end result is a juvenile justice system which does provide a very comprehensive solution for the minors that are involved in the terrorist activity," says Hirsh.
While Israel is under pressure over the issue, at its heart is the occupation. When it began occupying the West Bank, there were about a million Palestinians there. Now there are 2.5 million. Central to the conflict is that the Palestinians wake up each day under an occupation they do not want.
International condemnation of Israel's military court is growing; scores of British lawyers and politicians have visited the military court and 74 members of the House of Commons have signed a petition against it.
Strangely, not a single Australian politician is known to have visited the court, despite the fact an Australian barrister, Gerard Horton, takes delegations to the court. Horton says he is not pro-Palestinian but "pro rule of law".
"Essentially the way this system operates is through fear and intimidation," he says.
"It is much more effective to occupy people's minds psychologically.
"You never know when the army is going to come into your village. You never know when there's going to be a bang on the door in the middle of the night and soldiers are going to demand that you bring out your children and one of them is taken away."
Israel rejects this analysis.
"A policy to create fear?" says spokesman Palmor. "There is no such thing. The only policy is to maintain law and order, that's all. If there's no violence, there's no law enforcement."
In Israel, more than 950 current and former combat soldiers, in a group known as Breaking the Silence, have given testimonies about abuses they witnessed in the West Bank.
Shaul, the former army commander who founded the group, tells Inquirer: "I grew up believing that our actions as a military in the occupied territories are here to protect Israel from terrorism.
"What I've learned from my three years of service and nine years of activism and Breaking the Silence, after reading testimonies of over 950 soldiers, is that the main story here is about maintaining our absolute military control over Palestinians.
"It's basically not about defending our country from terrorism, it's about entrenching our military control over the Palestinian people, and that's basically what we see."
The UN says 726,000 Palestinian men, women and children have been through the military court. For almost four years on and off, The Australian has reported on the system.
After a feature in The Weekend Australian the Israeli Defence Forces threatened to ban access for me even though they conceded there were no errors in the story. They did not proceed with a ban.
Some Israeli officials admit a problem. "Military courts are to justice what military bands are to music," one said.
I told that official I had visited the military court where children shuffle across a courtyard shackled in groups of four and wearing small prison overalls. I invited him to come to the court and suggested that as a father he would be horrified. "I don't need to go there to know I would be horrified," the official said. He declined the offer to visit the prison.
John Lyons's investigation will appear this Monday night at 8.30 on ABC television's Four Corners.
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