Jews continue to torture Palestinian children

http://www.yellowtimes.org/article.php?sid=410&mode=thread&order=0

''The Anne Franks of Palestine''
June 20, 2002 @ 01:37:13 EDT

By Yusuf Agha
YellowTimes.org Columnist (United States)

(YellowTimes.org) – "It’s utterly impossible for me to build my life on a foundation of chaos, suffering and death. I see the world being slowly transformed into a wilderness, I hear the approaching thunder that, one day, will destroy us too, I feel the suffering of millions. And yet, when I look up at the sky, I somehow feel that everything will change for the better, that this cruelty too shall end, that peace and tranquility will return once more." (Anne Frank)

Some years ago, I visited the home where Anne Frank and her family concealed themselves for fear of Nazi
persecution. It was a cool but sunny afternoon in Amsterdam, with tulips swaying gently in the breeze. And apart from the hustle and bustle of tourists ambling down the Prinsengracht to visit the home - a veritable shrine to the innocence of a teenage girl caught up in the madness of war - peace and tranquility had returned once more.

Nine months after being arrested, Anne Frank died of Typhus in March of 1945 at the concentration camp at
Bergen-Belsen - she was 15 years old. It's hard to believe that the insanity surrounding her torment happened less than sixty years ago.

It is harder still to believe that this madness continues to this day.

Also almost six decades ago, catastrophic events in 1948 resulted in thousands of Palestinians being wrenched out of their homes, dispossessed and denied the right of returning to their ancestral homes. They must, to paraphrase Anne Frank, have seen their world being slowly transformed into a wilderness; they must have heard the approaching thunder that, one day, would destroy them.

There is a difference, though. Post-Nazi Europe thrives; the Jews have found a homeland. But for the Palestinians, the cruelty has not ended.

Meet today's Anne Frank. Suad Ghazal is seventeen years old and a prisoner in an Israeli prison. Suad was only fifteen years when she was arrested after being accused by an adult female settler of attempted assault. Following her arrest, she was taken to a settlement police post where she was severely beaten by Israeli settlers.

Suad was then incarcerated in Ramle prison, where her agony continued unabated.

Those who have seen World War II movies will be familiar with Nazi- and Japanese-style isolation cells, where "less desirable" prisoners were kept to break their morale. In Ramle, "the isolation cells are two meters square with an open toilet," reports the Geneva-based human rights group Defense for Children International/Palestine Section (DCI/PS). In April 2001, Suad was repeatedly placed in such cells for varying lengths of time, totally devastated and alone.

... the minute I was alone I knew I was going to cry my eyes out. I slid to the floor in my nightgown and began by saying my prayers, very fervently. Then I drew my knees to my chest, lay my head on my arms and cried, all huddled up on the bare floor. A loud sob brought me back down to earth... (Anne Frank)

"Subsequently," continues the DCI report, "Suad was moved to a stifling hot, rank cell that measured three meters by one meter which she was forced to share with another prisoner. The room had one bed that Suad slept on, while the other prisoner slept on the floor. They were given blankets that were covered in mites, causing rashes on their skin."

Meet a second Anne Frank: fourteen year-old Sanaa Amer. Overlook, if you can, that "her arms and legs were tied to her bed continuously for 8-hours a day over two consecutive days."

Sanaa and her sister were convicted of "intent" to stab an Israeli settler in Hebron. An Israeli military court tried and sentenced the child to a twelve months imprisonment term - a sentence that DCI/PS calls "shocking as it did not take into account her age or the fact that she did not carry out any violent act whatsoever."

Sanaa, too, was sent to Ramle. Soon after, reports the DCI, in response to the deteriorating situation in prison, "the female Palestinian political detainees launched a hunger strike at the end of June. The prison administration … attacked the detainees with tear gas and heavy batons. The prisoners were taken to isolation and beaten."

"During the attack, Sanaa Amer was beaten with batons on her arms and legs. Her arms were tied behind her back and she was kicked by police in her stomach, inducing her to cough up blood."

Was it for Suad and Sanaa that Anne penned these lines? "I've reached the point where I hardly care whether I live or die. The world will keep on turning without me, and I can't do anything to change events anyway."

But Suad and Sanaa are not alone. DCI reports that approximately 600 Palestinian children have been arrested by the Israeli occupation authorities since the beginning of the second Intifada in September 2000, of whom around 160 remain incarcerated.

From Jerusalem alone, more than 100 Palestinian children under the age of eighteen have been arrested since September, reports the Jerusalem Center for Social and Economic Rights (JCSER). "Many of them were arrested during demonstrations for throwing stones. These minors are jailed for an average of four to six months and held in custody at least until his or her trial finishes. Furthermore, children have been placed in cells with those who have been detained for criminal offences. Child detainees have been subjected to different kinds of torture like beating, scalding with hot water."

The DCI reports that in flagrant contravention of international law, "over the last ten months, 12 Palestinian child political prisoners have been imprisoned with Israeli juvenile criminal prisoners in the Ofar section of Telmond. Such a practice has led to beatings, harassment, theft of personal belongings, cutting with razors and even attempted
rape of Palestinian children."

Al-Ahram weekly quotes from a report issued by the Israeli human rights group, B'Tselem. The report exposes "the systematic torture and abuse of Palestinian minors detained at the police station in Gush Etzion, near the West Bank town of Bethlehem. … Police arrested Palestinian children in their homes in the middle of the night and took them to the police station in Gush Etzion, where police interrogators tortured them until the morning to obtain confessions
and information about other minors."

The report continues: "Methods of torture described in the report included forcing the juvenile detainees to stand in painful positions for prolonged periods; beating them severely for hours at a time with various objects; splashing cold water on the detainees in the facility's courtyard in wintry conditions; pushing their heads into the toilet bowl and flushing the toilet; making death threats and cursing and degrading them."

Meet Ahmad Ziad Hijazi, a Jerusalem resident and imminent threat-extraordinare to the IDF for all of his tender fifteen years. He, too, threw stones at tanks and armored cars. Ahmad suffers from asthma and "since his arrest," reports the JCSER, "has spent about 40 days in isolation. It was only recently that he was transferred to a child prison. The conditions in prison worsened his health condition enormously. Today, he needs treatment three times a day."

I'll just let matters take their course … and hope that everything will be all right in the end. (Anne Frank)
The JCSER has issued a condemnation of "the conditions and treatment of Palestinian children in Israeli prisons.

Many of these prisons lack basic facilities and living conditions, violate not only Israeli law, but also the Convention on the Rights of the Child." Article 37 of the 1989 UN Convention on the Rights of the Child reads: "No child shall be subjected to torture or other
cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment..."

The Rights of the Child! What rights do brutal regimes like the Third Reich grant children like Anne Frank? What rights do tortuous regimes like Sharon's permit the children of Palestine?

Writing in the Israeli paper Ha'aretz, Joseph Algazy tells of the 80 Palestinian youths imprisoned at Telmond, most of them15 and 16 years old. "They were arrested because of their participation in protest activities of the Al-Aqsa Intifada. The youths, members of their families, their attorneys and DCI, have complained in the past that jailed

Palestinian minors have been beaten and humiliated during their detention and interrogation, have been tortured physically and mentally, have had confessions extorted from them, and have been sentenced by military courts to long periods of imprisonment and payment of fines."

The Ha'aretz article recalls the harrowing statements made under oath to the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel, by some of the minors prisoners at Telmond. They deposed "about the types of violence used against them when they were arrested in their homes, usually in the middle of the night; about the beatings they received during their interrogation at police headquarters or in military prison facilities, in order to extort confessions that would incriminate them and others; about being kept in isolation for long periods of time, in cells without bathrooms; and about being held in the Telmond prison with criminals who abused and attacked them."

The article also quotes the Palestine Red Crescent, according to which "154 Palestinian minors (under 18) were killed in the period between September 29, 2000 and June 17, 2001; of these, 26 were children under the age of 12, including infants. The number of minors injured is estimated in the thousands."


It’s utterly impossible for me to build my life on a foundation of chaos, suffering and death. (Anne Frank) These are the camps of Ramle and Telmond, the latter ironically located on confiscated Palestinian land, run by the Israel Prison Service. They are the modern versions of the fearsome "Jugenverwahrlage" or "children camps" of the Nazis, where hundreds of children and teenagers were transferred to these places - before they were shipped to extermination centers.

But there are no exterminations, you say? Ask of the parents of Abu Mutawi. Last Tuesday evening, June 11, Abu Mutawi, a 9-year-old Palestinian child was shot dead when IDF forces opened fire on a residential area in Gaza. The child was struck by an Israeli bullet in the chest in the proximity of his home.

The Israeli army had no comment.

Also last Tuesday, a ten year-old Palestinian girl, Wissam Muhamed, was wounded when an Israeli settler ran over her Tuesday, reports the Palestinian News Agency, WAFA. The Israeli settler is an inhabitant of the illegal settlement of Dutan. No arrests have yet been made.

In a letter to George Bush in February this year, a number of Palestinian school children had this to ask of the U.S. President: "Like all children in the world, we just want to live a normal and peaceful childhood, to be able to reach school safely, and to be able to sleep at night in comfort when even our parents' comforting does not free us from the horror we live on a daily basis, the images of funerals, humiliating checkpoints, and injured friends, and the fear
of the sounds of shelling and gun ships - Are we asking for too much?"

Maybe at least one ten year-old child in Rafah was asking for too much.

Jennifer Loewenstein, a prolific writer who also works for the Mezan Center for Human Rights in Gaza City, recalls events in April this year of how "Israeli soldiers shot dead a ten year old boy in Rafah for having the audacity to play too close to the border. The children of Rafah make good target practice for those planning their nighttime raids into the refugee camps there and elsewhere throughout the Strip."

Golda Meir, the former Israeli Prime minister, once said: "There will be peace in the Middle East only when the Arabs love their children more than they hate Israel." What the "gentle" Prime Minister of Israel failed to understand was that it is not that the Palestinian mothers' love their children less, it is their incarceration, their torture, their deaths that they despise.

It is the criminal hijack of the future of entire generations of Palestinians by successive Israeli governments.

Like "Huriya Beni Odeh from the village of Jiftlik [who] had a miscarriage because of delays at an Israel Defense Forces roadblock, when she was on her way from her home to the hospital in Jericho," per a DCI report.

Or like another little ten year-old girl, Osa'ama Hamdan with her warm brown eyes and gentle locks of hair, "who died of complications of pneumonia after her parents were prevented [by IDF forces] from taking her to the hospital in Nablus."

And yet, when she looked up at the sky, she must somehow have felt that everything will change for the better, that this cruelty too shall end, that peace and tranquility will return once more.