The Assistant Undersecretary of the Prisoners and Editors Affairs Authority for Specialized Administrations Professor Bassam Al-Majdalawi stressed yesterday that what the occupation authorities did during the process of transferring children from Ofer detention center to Damoon Prison, by storming their department and transferring them with terror, violence and cold, Without their representatives or even allowing them to take their needs and clothes, it is in contravention of the Convention on Children adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in 1959, which provides for the protection of children and their rights to life, education, food and freedom.
Al-Majdalawi explained that the occupation authorities commit dozens of violations against child detainees such as psychological and physical torture, exploiting the weak child’s structure, focusing on torture, threatening, and sometimes humiliating and intimidating dogs, and using illegal means such as deception and false promises, cruel treatment, military deterrent courts and unfair laws, in addition to imposing fines. Finance, their confinement in solitary confinement rooms, the use of force and detention in places that are not appropriate for them and their ages, as well as provocative searches.
He pointed out that the occupation authorities arrest nearly 200 children, who are subjected to flagrant violations, in violation of all international norms and covenants that guarantee the protection of these minors and their physical rights.
Psychological and educational and their communication with their families and with guides who direct their lives and deal with them as children and not as terrorists and adults as the prison administration deals with them.
Al-Majdalawi stated that the child detainees suffer from the loss of health, cultural and psychological care and the absence of counselors inside the prison, in addition to holding them near Israeli criminal prisoners in many cases, and intimidation and abuse during detention, by means of systematic methods aimed at destroying Palestinian childhood and many health effects Psychological, physical and social.
Al-Majdalawi called on children´s rights organizations to monitor the conditions of minor detainees in Israeli detention, to hear their testimonies, to hold the occupying power accountable for its crimes against them, and to commit it to international agreements, covenants, treaties and decisions to protect them.
