Outrage at video of Israeli soldiers arresting Palestinian children

A video depicting Israeli soldiers forcibly arresting Palestinian children has drawn outrage and condemnation online. The footage, posted by Israeli rights group B’tselem shows several soldiers taking struggling children toward military vehicles. 

At one point another child attempts to free one of the children from the grips of a soldier, before being dragged away by another soldier. Children can be heard crying out as they are pushed into a military vehicle. 

“This is what impunity looks like,” wrote one user. 

Every year, Israel arrests hundreds of Palestinian children. It is the only country in the world that automatically prosecutes children in military courts.

The most common charge is throwing stones.

“This is what occupation and apartheid look like”

According to the NGO, five children between the ages of 8 and 12 were detained on Wednesday near the illegal outpost of Havat Maon, and taken to a police station at Kiryat Arba.

Prior to the arrest the children were gathering wild vegetables when two masked settlers scared them away and took their buckets and plants, the organisation posted on its Twitter account. The soldiers were apparently invited by the settlers, it added in another post.

Sarit Michaeli, international advocacy officer of B’tselem later posted that the children were released, and that two of them, aged 12 to 13 would be “interrogated” on Sunday. 

“The fact that Palestinian children, some under the age of criminal responsibility, can be arrested for this offense [being in the illegal outpost] while the residents of this outposts and their visitors attack, vandalize and intimidate the entire vicinity with impunity, symbolizes the broader apartheid regime,” wrote Michaeli. 

“Defenceless”

The Israeli government is notorious for its arrest of Palestinian minors, nearly one thousand every year. Children as young as 8 or 9 have been detained. Many are picked up in the street or from their homes in the middle of the night. 

Israeli security forces blindfold and handcuff them, and often subject them to violence on the way to interrogation.

They are interrogated alone, without adults or immediate access to lawyers. 

They face inhumane treatment such as beatings, threats, yelling, verbal abuse, strip searches, psychological abuse, weeks in solitary confinement, and being denied access to a lawyer during interrogations, research has found. 

The UN, international rights groups and lawyers’ associations have repeatedly condemned Israel for its practices and violations of international law.