NOURNEWS- "Every child deserves a future"; Provided that he or she was not born in Gaza! This tragic fact is not only related to the chronic bombardment that sporadically destroys the life expectancy in this coastal strip, but also refers to the numerous prisons in the occupied territories that are full of Palestinian children.
Many consider Gaza to be the world's largest prison due to the permanent siege, which has imprisoned nearly 2,300,000 people in an open space, but the condition of this open prison cannot be compared to what happens in the classic and confined prisons of the Zionist regime.
The United Nations reported last year that since 1967, when the Israeli regime occupied the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, it has arrested about one million Palestinians. In simpler terms, one out of every five Palestinians has been arrested and accused by the Zionist regime. Of course, this statistic is limited to women; Because at least two out of every five Palestinian men have been arrested and charged. Also, at least four out of every 10 Palestinian men spend part of their lives in Israeli prisons.
Why is the number of arrests are so high?
The root of these arrests lies in the military orders of the Zionist regime, which has overshadowed all aspects of Palestinians' lives. These decrees criminalize any participation and organization of protests, printing and distribution of political materials, waving flags and or any other political symbols, and basically considers all forms of Palestinian resistance against Israeli occupation as examples of "terrorism" and deals with it accordingly. The most common charge is "stone throwing," which can sentence Palestinians to 20 years in prison.
According to these laws, 19 prisons inside the occupied territories and one prison in the occupied West Bank are always filled with Palestinian prisoners. In addition, there is a title called "administrative detention", according to which the Zionist regime allows itself to keep a person behind bars for an unlimited period of time without any charges. The military orders of the Zionist regime are not better for children either; For example, the Zionist regime can keep Palestinian children in preventive detention for 15 days before presenting any indictment, and the military court can extend this detention 40 times. Accordingly, every year, near 1000 Palestinian children are held in the detention centers of the Zionist regime in very bad physical and mental conditions, and they are the only children in the world who experience the presence and prosecution in military courts.
Physical and sexual abuse of children in prison
But what happens to children in the prisons of the Israeli regime is nothing compared to these shocking numbers and orders. According to published reports, four out of every five detained children (86%) are beaten. Nearly half of detained children (42%) were injured during arrest, including gunshot wounds and broken bones.
65% of children were arrested between midnight and dawn. 86% of children experienced severe beatings; 70% were threatened with more serious harm, and 60% were injured with guns or sticks. Sexual violence is also one of the more common harassment in these detention centers, and 69% of children reported that they were stripped, or their genitals were touched or hit during the search. 60% of children have experienced solitary confinement for different durations from one day up to 48 days; 70% said they were tortured by being starved, and the same number said they received no health care during detention. 58% of the children were deprived of meeting or communication with their families during their detention. Most of the children are accused of stone throwing.
If the children are lucky, and they are released for some reason, such during a prisoner exchange deal, they rarely return to their normal life. The most common complaints of these children are insomnia and frequent nightmares. The nightmare that has been living outside the prison for almost two months is hanging over the sky of Gaza. After the beginning of the new round of conflicts after the Al-Aqsa Storm operation on October 7, about 15,000 Palestinians have been martyred, and according to statistics, more than a third of the martyrs were children. This is despite the fact that during the conflicts, 7,000 people disappeared and were probably martyred, which, if confirmed, will bring the number of martyred children in Gaza to 8,000. A statistic that says that Gaza is not only the biggest slaughterhouse and prison for children, but also the altar for sacrificing humanity itself.
NOURNEWS