Jaber Hmeidat says his children, aged 9 and 12, left their home in the hills south of Hebron earlier this week to look for akoub, a wild vegetable similar to the artichoke that is in season.
He was surprised to learn that the children had been detained by Israeli forces.
“They were terrified,” he said in an interview on Thursday, the day after the arrest. “They haven’t been able to sleep all night.”
The father of nine said he spent Thursday trying to reassure his children and explain that what happened is part of the life of Palestinians living under Israeli occupation.
“I worked hard to lift their spirits,” he said.
Hmeidat added that the incident made him angry and said that if he were present, he would have tried to intervene.
“I would not have let them take the children, it would be on my corpse,” he said.
Nasser Nawaj’ah
Video of the incident was widely publicized on social media and furiously shared by activists as the latest discovery about Israel’s treatment of Palestinians.
Israeli copyright group B’Tselem, which published the video, said five boys, aged 8 to 13, were arrested on Wednesday by the Israeli army after choosing Akoub near a settlement in the occupied West Bank.
Israeli police said in a statement that the military detained four minors for allegedly breaking into private property and stealing parrots and other objects. The Israeli Defense Forces said a group was seen entering private property in the southern Hebron area and was transferred by a military patrol to the Israeli police after “a brief initial interrogation in the presence of the police”. The police said they did not detain the children after being transferred by the IDF and tried to locate their parents for “several hours” before waiting for them to be picked up.
But while the exact circumstances of the detention of children remain unclear, the incident offers a window into the reality of life under Israeli occupation, say human rights groups and some Palestinians.
Whether they were simply harvesting wild vegetables or allegedly stealing parrots, they say, there is no reasonable scenario in which 8-year-olds should be detained by armed soldiers.
“This shows, first of all, the Israeli authorities’ absolute contempt for the well-being of the Palestinians.” Amit Gilutz, Spokesperson B’Tselem said.
“Palestinians are constantly being dehumanized,” he said.
Gaby Lasky, a human rights lawyer who represents the children, said they were released five and a half hours after being detained on Wednesday by the Israeli army. The two oldest, aged 12 and 13, were forced to return next week for questioning, she said.
Israeli police said two boys were summoned with their parents on suspicion of theft of parrots and other objects.
The age of criminal responsibility under Israeli military law, which governs Palestinians living in the West Bank, is 12 years, according to UNICEF.
Lasky told NBC News that the children said they didn’t steal anything.
“Actually, it was just a matter of telling the boys to come home or move out a little and that’s it,” she said. “Their detention was humiliating.”
Video recording Published by B’Tselem and shot by Israeli activists appears to show children picking plants and placing them in buckets.
Separate footage shot by a field researcher B’Tselem later that day appears to show armed soldiers detaining and mistreating boys – believed to be the same children – in a white military vehicle while passersby look. At some point, an older child tries to pull one of the children out of a soldier’s clutches, only to be pulled out by another.
It was not clear what may have happened between the two videos.
The children were detained near Havat Maon, a settler outpost that is illegal under Israeli law, according to B’Tselem. There are dozens of such outposts in the West Bank, as well as some 130 officially recognized settlements, according to Peace Now, a group that defends an independent Palestinian state.
Palestinians consider all settlements to be illegal and a major obstacle to their goal of establishing an independent state that includes the West Bank, which Israel captured in the 1967 war.
Most of the international community considers Palestinian territories occupied and also considers settlements to be illegal and an impediment to peace. However, starting in 2017, American authorities began to abandon public references to the West Bank as “occupied” and in 2019 the US reversed its decades-old position that Israeli settlements in the West Bank are illegal.
Seven hundred Palestinians under the age of 18 were arrested by Israeli authorities in 2020, according to Khaled Quzmar, director-general for Palestinian International Children’s Defense, a group working to defend the rights of Palestinian children. It was not clear whether this included children who were detained in this incident.
More than 150 Palestinians under the age of 18 were held in Israeli custody, both detained and imprisoned, at the end of September, according to B’Tselem.
“Children are the main victim of the occupation,” said Quzmar. “They are paying the price of the occupation every day of their lives.”
Saphora Smith reported from the UK and Lawahez Jabari from Jerusalem.
