- Five Palestinian children were apprehended by Israeli soldiers in southern Hebron on Wednesday.
- The boys were then taken to a police station, where they remained detained for several hours.
- Three of the children. between the ages of 8 and 11, are minors with criminal responsibility in Israel.
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A video surfaced of five Palestinian children detained by Israeli soldiers near an outpost in the West Bank on Wednesday afternoon.
The children, aged 8 to 13, were apprehended after settlers from the Havat Maon settlement in southern Hebron reported them to a military patrol.
—Joshua Zitser (@mrjoshz) March 12, 2021
The video of the incident, initially shared by the non-profit human rights organization B’Tselem, shows the boys being escorted to a vehicle by Israeli Defense Forces soldiers. One of the children can be seen crying and struggling as an armed soldier puts her in the van. Another is holding hands with one of the soldiers.
They are just children, what is that? “, You can hear an adult yelling at the soldiers.
The boys are accused of trying to steal parrots from a private property in an Israeli settlement, an Israeli police spokesman told Insider.
Havat Maon is one of the many settler outposts in the West Bank, considered illegal under international law, which is not authorized by the Israeli government. There have been several incidents in the area of Palestinian children being harassed by Israeli settlers while going to school.
According to the children’s lawyer, armed soldiers took the children to the settlement and questioned them about the alleged robbery attempt.
“They were taken to the illegal outpost of Havat Maon, where the soldiers tried to get a confession from them, which is illegal,” their lawyer, Gaby Lasky, told Insider.
Both the Israeli police and the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) contest this claim and instead insist that the boys were immediately taken to a police station.
A Palestinian child is escorted by an Israeli soldier to a police vehicle outside Havat Maon, in the West Bank, on March 10, 2021.
Nasser Nawaj’ah / B’Tselem
After being transferred to the Kiryat Arba police station, the boys were detained for several hours. His parents, despite several attempts, were unable to contact or locate their children, according to Lasky.
Israeli officials say the aim of the detention was to help reunite them with their families. An IDF spokesman told Insider that the boys were transferred to a police facility for “further processing” and “locating their parents”.
This is echoed by the Israeli police force. “The minors were taken to the police, who acted to locate their parents who live in Palestinian territory, for several hours,” the spokesman told Insider.
Lasky, who is representing the five boys, said the boys’ detention was a crime.
“Three of the children were under the criminal age of responsibility, so they cannot detain them and they cannot take them to the police station or anywhere else. This is completely illegal, ”she told a source.
The age of criminal responsibility in Israel is 12 years old. Three of the boys are between 8 and 11 years old. The two oldest boys are 12 and 13 years old and old enough to be charged with a crime.
The lawyer also believes that the use of military force against children was unjustified. “The way in which children were taken and forced to kneel when they were detained is not only unnecessary, but also completely illegal,” Lasky told Insider.
Israeli lawyer Gaby Lasky in a Jerusalem court on September 16, 2018.
AHMAD GHARABLI / AFP via Getty Image
Lasky lodged a complaint with the attorney general of the Occupied Palestinian Territories and the Israeli police.
All five boys were initially called in for further interrogation, according to their lawyer. While the two oldest boys will be questioned on Sunday, the three youngest children had their subpoena canceled after an objection from their lawyer, Lasky told Insider.
Human rights organization B’Tselem, whose activists were at the scene, said the incident sheds light on the reality of life under occupation.
“It is part of the routine of the occupation that incidents like this, however absurd they may be, occur,” Amit Gilutz, a spokesman for B’Tselem, told Insider. “It is a reflection of the Israeli authorities’ absolute contempt for the well-being of the Palestinians.”
“No matter what these children were doing in the vicinity of the settlements,” he added, “they shouldn’t have been arrested by military force.”