Posted on: 02/03/2014

The Electronic Intifada’s contributor Patrick O. Strickland and New York-based graphic designerRachele Lee Richards have produced this powerful infographic that highlights the systematic violence against Palestinian children.

More than 1,400 children killed by Israeli soldiers, settlers since 2000.

Strickland contributed the following text to accompany the infographic.

Systematic violations

The photograph, taken by Dylan Collins, showssix-year-old Mousab Sarahnin, who lost his eye when an Israeli soldier shot him in the face with a steel-coated rubber bullet on 27 September 2013. According to witnesses and Defence for Children International – Palestine Section (DCI-PS), Mousab was walking with his family in Fuwwar refugee camp when he was shot — and was nowhere near demonstrations or clashes.

The statistics regarding Palestinian children in our infographic are taken from DCI-PS. The other statistics are derived from a July 2013 report published by the Israeli human rights group Yesh Din: they paint a picture of total impunity for Israeli soldiers and settlers who harass and attack Palestinian children on a daily basis.

Not visible on the infographic is the alarming fact that 19 of the twenty cases in which Israeli soldiers used Palestinian children as human shields took place after Israel’s own high court ruled that it was illegal. Nonetheless, there are no documented cases of soldiers being reprimanded with jail time for this action.

“Show the world what the army does to children”

Due to size constraints, other gross violations against children are absent, such as instances of children killed by Israeli drones or the number of those threatened with sexual abuse by police officers and soldiers.

In Israel’s own education system, on the other hand, textbooks depict Palestinians as “refugees, primitive farmers and terrorists,” as reported in The Guardian in 2011. The same textbooks attempted to morally justify the killing of Palestinians as necessary for Israel’s establishment.

Furthermore, nearly half of Jewish Israeli high school students aged 16 and 17 stated that they would refuse to have an Arab teacher, according to an August 2013 poll published in the Israeli daily Haaretz.

While Israel’s political establishment continually attempts to demonize Palestinian children, the sad fact is that it tries to hide its own cultivation of hate in the education system. At the same time, the Israeli army is engaged in an ongoing process of dehumanizing and brutalizing Palestinian children.

As Sheikh Jibreen Saharnin, six-year-old Mousab’s uncle, told The Electronic Intifada in October, “Take photos. Send it everywhere in the world. Show the world what the Israeli army does to children.”

Source:

http://electronicintifada.net

Posted August 3, 2012 in www.electronicintifada.com

JERUSALEM (IRIN) At a glance, the latest data on food security in the West Bank and Gaza Strip — released by the Food and Agriculture Organization, the World Food Programme and the UN agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA) in July — seems to warrant optimism.

The year 2011 was the second straight year in which the number of those living in food insecurity declined in the West Bank and Gaza. In the Gaza Strip, the percentage dropped from 60 in 2009 to 44 in 2011; in the West Bank, food insecurity rates have decreased 5 percent in the same two-year period to 17 percent.

But, as UNRWA itself admits, a deeper look into the numbers is less encouraging.

In the West Bank, Palestinians who live in refugee camps have actually experienced a rise in food insecurity — from 25 percent in 2009 to 29 percent in 2011. One quarter of Palestinian households in Israeli-controlled Area C are food insecure — 8 percent more than the West Bank average. Herders’ families in Area C (which covers more than 60 percent of the West Bank) are in a precarious situation, with 34 percent suffering from food insecurity.

And while food insecurity stands at just under 30 percent in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip combined, the World Health Organization reported in May 2012 that 50 percent of infants and children under two in the West Bank and Gaza have iron deficiency anemia. According to the same WHO report, malnutrition and stunting in children under five “is not improving” and could actually be “deteriorating” (“Health conditions in the occupied Palestinian territory”

Dramatic changes

The second intifada saw dramatic changes in Palestinians’ eating habits. Israeli-imposed movement restrictions on both people and goods strangled the economy; Palestinians’ inability to access farmland due to Israeli prohibitions and the construction of Israel’s wall in the West Bank led to reduced agricultural output. Under these pressures, Palestinians increasingly came to rely on cereals, pulses, potatoes, vegetable oil and sugar rather than more costly and more nutritious foods like protein-rich fish and meat, fresh fruits and vegetables.

In 2003, at the height of the second intifada, the Food and Agriculture Organization reported that meals in the West Bank and Gaza Strip often consisted of just tea and bread. Despite these dire circumstances, the FAO did not recommend increased food aid. Instead, the organization stated that the most pressing issue, economic access — or the ability to buy food — must be addressed. In the short term, that meant job creation; in the long term, it meant investment in agriculture.

Yet, almost a decade later, critics say that most aid organizations remain focused on temporary, short-term solutions rather than the underlying problems.

Decline in agriculture

Haneen Ghazawneh, a researcher at the Palestinian Economic Policy Research Institute (MAS) in Ramallah, said international aid was still “going [more] to emergency assistance and food aid and less to development projects,” contributing to “the decline in agriculture.”

Ghazawneh also takes issue with the latest food security data.

“When we talk about economic access [to food] that means having permanent jobs,” she explained. “My worry about these recent reports is that they exclude East Jerusalem, [where] people have very limited [work opportunities].”

She also said the apparent gains in parts of the West Bank, where the Palestinian Authority is nominally in control of many affairs, may be illusory.

In the West Bank, many of those who are food secure are on the PA payroll, said Ghazawneh. But much of the PA’s funding comes from foreign aid, leaving employees vulnerable to changes in the political climate and the global economy — as was the case in July, when the PA could pay only half of employees’ salaries.

“We’re talking about the workers who are the most secure, who have permanent jobs, and they are uncertain,” she said. “The situation is not sustainable at all.”

As many Palestinians have increasingly embraced a culture of consumption and debt, some have bought houses and cars they cannot afford. If salaries suddenly stop coming and people fall behind on their loan payments, the banks could have problems. And this, perhaps, could fuel a larger financial crisis that would have an impact on food security.

Source:

http://electronicintifada.net

Posted  in July 31, 2014.

By Hashem Said

Beyond the immediate loss in Gaza — destruction of property, infrastructure, and the deaths of more than 1,600 people, mostly civilians — Israel’s onslaught will have long-term mental and physical effects on the Palestinian children who survived weeks of airstrikes and naval and tank shelling.

Many of them watched as family members were killed and homes, schools and mosques bombarded. Others suffered life-altering injuries. Israel’s military campaign may also affect the unborn, as mothers and fathers struggle with traumatic stress, health experts warn.

Psychological impact

Even before the current military offensive, young Gazans bore the mental scars of years under siege and previous episodes of bombardment. After the 2012 war, the rate of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) among children in Gaza doubled, according to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, which provides assistance for Palestinian refugees. Mental health experts fear that the latest bombardment may create detrimental repercussions too difficult for children to overcome.

Dr. Jesse Ghannam, clinical professor of psychiatry and global health sciences at the University of California at San Francisco School of Medicine

Palestinian children in Gaza are exposed to more violence in their lifetime than any other people, any other children, anywhere in the world. If you look at children right now who are 10 years old, they’ve been through Cast Lead in 2008 and 2009, the invasion in 2012 and now the invasion and destruction in 2014, in addition to the siege. If you look at the statistics, for example, even before Cast Lead, 80 percent of Palestinian children in Gaza have witnessed some sort of violence against them, a friend or a family member. And now you’re getting to the point where probably close to 99 percent of children in Gaza are being exposed to a level of violence where they have seen family members be killed, murdered, burned alive. There’s nothing like the levels of traumatic exposure that any child in the world has ever been exposed to on a chronic and daily basis.

We can rebuild a broken bone, but when it comes to rebuilding someone’s psychological integrity, this is something that the people in the West and the Israelis don’t understand. They’re creating psychological damage for these kids that will be with them for the rest of their lives.

The psychological damage makes it difficult to function, to be successful in school, to have relationships with friends and family, to take care of yourself and at a more profound and deeper level — when we’re talking about creating a solution for the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and the West wanting peace between the Israelis and Palestinians — they aren’t growing up interested in peace and wanting to make things better. They just grow up deeply traumatized and very distraught and angry.

Brad Parker, international advocacy officer and attorney, Defence for Children International, Palestine

Children in Gaza are traumatized. They’re suffering trauma from killing that they witnessed, maiming that maybe they themselves suffered, the injuries that they see around them. They’re traumatized by loss of their family members, by the fact that their homes have been destroyed, that they’re displaced and living in a shelter with a bunch of strangers.

With conflicts and displacements, there tends to be an increase in instances of child abuse and violence and things that make children even more vulnerable to abuse and other violations of their rights. The bombing is one thing, but it leads to a variety of other challenges for child protection.

Dr. Jennifer Leaning, director, FXB Center for Health and Human Rights at Harvard University

You’ve got a situation where grandparents, parents and uncles are already very stressed, and that would show in a number of ways: depression; certain clampdowns of emotions; and a tendency to get very upset at small incidents.

All of this really has an impact on kids growing up. They’re realizing that their entire structure for safety and protection is not doing very well.

I would say that in all studies of disaster and in war crisis, the fundamental feature that protects the children from serious psychological stress is their certainty and their confidence that their parents or grandparents will be able to protect them and hold them. If they can get the sense that the parent is OK, then they will be able in the long-term. In the short term they may be upset, but in the long term they will be OK.

You have now complete disruption of the very structures for psychological stability of the parents, and grandparents are also suffering greatly.

It will be important for — as soon as possible — stability to be restored and the parents to get it together for themselves to create a sense of confidence in themselves for their children. But I think the odds of that are not high for two reasons: One is there’s going to be ongoing violence and lingering uncertainty for some time in Gaza, even if there is hopefully a cease-fire that can be arranged. The worry will continue on the part of the adults and the children will remain terrified and unable to relax, literally and figuratively, in the arms of their family.

And then secondly, the parents and grandparents and others themselves, are in no psychological position to be able to convey that umbrella of hope and safety for the children. The resilience of the Palestinian population in general is not going to be as deep or robust as any of us want it to be and certainly as they would want it to be, just because this have been extraordinary series of acute stress on top of chronic stress.

Dr. Jumana Odeh, director, Palestinian Happy Child Centre

It’s tough for our children here in the West Bank too. For example, if a child with autism comes with his parents to be treated, they have to deal with several checkpoints first. It’s not easy to get around, and lately it has become more complicated. So this affects them and their parents.

I also noticed lately that some kids — say, one with Down syndrome — are afraid to move because they fear being burned alive like Mohamed Abu Khdeir. So everybody knows that seeing traumatic, bloody or sad events — even through television — can traumatize children. They watch it on TV, they see it going from one place to another crossing checkpoints, and they hear it from their parents, from their grandparents. If we talk about PTSD, here it is a continuous PTSD, and this is the most dangerous and the most painful, because we don’t know how this will affect the future generations. It is difficult to think of the future when children are under fire, especially in Gaza. There’s no place to run, no place to hide.

 Physical impact

For more than 7,300 people, including many children, recovering from injuries will be challenging, as the siege on Gaza also affects medical facilities. Leaning warns that many of the injured won’t survive, adding to the 300-plus children killed, or will be left with chronic complications.

Leaning: The hospitals there are valiantly overwhelmed and short of supplies, and in those situations they inevitably have to perform triage. They can operate only on people whose injuries are within the skill set of the doctors and the capacity operating rooms have and nurses to treat.

There are people who are coming into these hospitals with traumatic wounds from the bombings and machine-gun fire, who in a well-equipped and highly skilled or emergency area in the West would survive. But in these hospitals, they won’t survive because there’s just not the capacity to care for these extremely extensive wounds. There are more people dying of wounds in Palestine now than there would be if they had a stable and fully equipped trauma center.

The wounded range from being rather minor to chronic. And the Gaza Strip at the moment does not have the capacity to handle chronic wounds. You can’t keep people in the hospital for long because it’s overrun by new injuries. Nursing care is very short.

A number of these people who are wounded are going to have difficulty surviving over the longer run. They may have left with wounds to be cared for at home, but taking care of those injuries is a skill situation. Another point is that people need to be in one place to heal. They are running from places. That’s very difficult, and there are very few safe havens for people where they could rest for a week and have their bones knit or their abdominal wounds begin to close or their head injuries not reopen. I worry that there is going to be a significant number of people with longer-term disabilities because they have not been treated adequately or taken care of enough in the immediate term.

The number of dead and the number of wounded convey a false impression that the wounded are going to be OK.

Ghannam: Palestinian children in Gaza are on what the Israeli military leadership has called a starvation diet. You have almost 80 percent of Palestinian children living on less than $1 a day. They’re at levels of what we would call poverty and extreme poverty, with extensive food insecurity. That’s just another way of saying that most Palestinian children in Gaza go to bed hungry every day, so their caloric intake has been significantly reduced since the siege began within the last seven years. In addition to the reduced number of calories they take in, the kind of nutrients they’re getting is also decreased, so what we see is this medical phenomenon called stunting, which results in lower birth weights for Palestinian children. Their average birth weight is going down. Their height and weight are below what you would consider basic international norm values for children that age.

People pay attention to Gaza only when bombs are dropping on their heads, but when I was there in December, I was devastated to see the kind of food insecurity, the lack of nutrition, the kind of starvation that Palestinian children have to suffer on a daily basis. And this is an Israeli policy. The policy is to let in only so much food. Not enough to kill people, but it’s a slow death. You see it in Palestinian children.

 Impact on the unborn

In addition to Gaza’s children who are experiencing the war, even children who are not born yet may suffer. Radioactive materials in Israeli bombs may cause birth defects and abnormalities for years to come, according to researchers who studied Israel’s previous military campaigns in Gaza.

Paola Manduca, professor of genetics, University of Genoa, Italy

In Gaza we learned that among the population with children born with birth defects, if you compare them with those who are born normal, regardless of other factors, in the ones with birth defects the mothers reported exposure to white phosphorus, white phosphorus and bombing or bombing in Cast Lead in 67 percent of the cases.

One very important thing we learned from a study conducted two years after Cast Lead was that children born two years after the operation — therefore the mothers in the next year or so before becoming pregnant were not directly exposed to ammunition — still were constant correlation. That can be because the mothers were continuously exposed to a toxicant, which is compatible with the fact that the mothers have been staying in the same place as when Cast Lead occurred. Most of the people have fixed their houses or cleaned the mat from the rubble and used the materials to rebuild them.

There’s not much space in Gaza to go and build somewhere else. So if contaminants were in the ground, the contaminants would have stayed there. Of course, contaminants that may have been there will stay in the environment and in the body of the people who got contaminated, which persist in the organisms and stay in the organisms.

We already studied and knew that toxicants and teratogens — that is, substances that can cause reproduction malformation — were present in the land and in the weaponry used in Gaza. These metals were at one point in people who were wounded by different kinds of metals. So we studied, and eventually, if the children with malformation were in fact contaminated by teratogen or toxicant metals, we found very specific contamination for some elements in children with birth defects different from the children born premature and different from the normal births. High levels known to be teratogenic were found in the birth defects of children that were not found in premature children.

Source:

http://america.aljazeera.com

Posted  in July 2, 2014.

By  Olivia Becker

The number of Palestinian children held in solitary confinement, subjected to harsh interrogation and general mistreatment in Israeli prisons is increasing, according to a report released on Monday by an international non-governmental organization.

The report was released by Defense for Children International – Palestine (DCI-P), a monitoring organization that focuses on the treatment of children in areas of conflict, and details the treatment of Palestinian children between the ages of 12 and 17 in the occupied West Bank throughout last year.

The report found that solitary confinement was used as a form of interrogation and intimidation in nearly 22 percent of recorded cases — a 2 percent increase since 2012. The average length of solitary confinement was 10 days, with the longest period being 29 days.

In addition to solitary confinement, the report also found that more than 76.5 percent of Palestinian children detained in Israeli prisons experienced some form of physical violence, 74.5 experienced verbal abuse, and 98 percent were not informed of the reason for the arrest.

Between 500 and 700 Palestinian children are detained every year in the Israeli military prison system. Since 2000, approximately 8,000 Palestinian children have been arrested and prosecuted in Israeli military courts.

The overwhelming charge brought against Palestinian youths is stone throwing, which can lead to a sentence of up to 20 years in prison.

In 85 percent of these cases children are taken from their homes in the middle of the night during raids carried out by Israeli soldiers, according to the report, which states that the children are then blindfolded and forcibly brought to a detention center inside Israel, where they are interrogated by the Israel Security Agency, (or Shin Bet), the Israeli equivalent of the FBI.

Dual System of Laws

Although the systematic use of solitary confinement and physical abuse against minors is arguably an offense in and of itself, it is part of a much broader issue of the system of laws that govern the region.

Since the West Bank is an occupied territory, Israeli military law is the legal system that governs it. But this legal system solely applies to the Palestinian inhabitants of the West Bank, and not the 600,000 Israeli citizens that live there in illegal settlements.

“There is a dual legal system that exists in the West Bank,” George Bisharat, a professor of criminal procedure and law at University of California Hastings College of Law, told VICE News. “Israel citizens are subject to Israeli civil law, while all Palestinians, both adults and juveniles, are subject to Israeli military law.”

This legal framework is not only discriminatory, but actively in violation of international law. Arresting children in the West Bank and bringing them to Israel for interrogation and detainment violates Article 76 of the Fourth Geneva Convention that forbids the transfer of detainees outside the occupied territory. Article 76 even specifies, “proper regard shall be paid to the special treatment due to minors.”

Up until 2009, Palestinian children were charged in the same courts as adults, another violation of international law. It was not until immense international criticism that Israel created separate courts for Palestinian minors.

Last July, Israeli soldiers arrested a five-year old Palestinian boy for stone throwing. The video of the arrest, captured by Israeli human rights group B’tselem, quickly spread and provoked outrage.

Although there are several detention centers inside the West Bank, the vast majority of detainees are usually brought to centers inside Israel to face a military trial. This trial is almost always the first time the detainee sees their family or a lawyer.

Nearly 100 Percent Conviction Rate The overall conviction rate for Palestinians in Israeli military courts is 99.74 percent. Of the 853 youths charged with rock-throwing between 2005 and 2011, only one was acquitted.

More than 650,000 Palestinians have been arrested by Israel since 1967, when its occupation of the Palestinian territories began, according to the Council for European Palestinian Relations (CEPR). Therefore, 40 percent of all Palestinian males have at one point been arrested by Israel.

About 20 percent of Palestinians arrested by Israel occurred during the first intifada, or uprising, between 1987 and 1992. During this period 120,000 Palestinians were arrested and detained in Israeli jails, making Palestinians one of the most imprisoned populations in the world.

A spokesperson for the Israeli military told VICE News that the reason for the high number of arrests amongst Palestinians is because the IDF faces extensive violence on a daily basis from Palestinian minors — violence that is encouraged by the surrounding culture and an institutionalized public support system.

“The IDF strongly rejects the claims that Palestinian minors are systematically mistreated in any way after being detained for involvement in violent acts or terror activity,” said the statement from the IDF.

But the reason for the high number of arrests and convictions among Palestinian adults and youths is not necessarily due to a high rate of criminal activity or violence inherent in Palestinian youths or culture, Bisharat pointed out.

“One of the more troubling aspects of the mistreatment of juveniles is the way in which the Israeli legal system has been used as a tool of pressure to recruit collaborators,” he said. “Children are one of the most vulnerable populations to be recruited.”

DCI-P’s report echoes this with regards to the use of solitary confinement.

“The use of solitary confinement by Israeli authorities does not appear to be related to any disciplinary, protective, or medical rationale or justification,” the report states.

International Attention

This is not the first time Israel’s treatment of Palestinian child prisoners has received attention and international condemnation.

In February 2013, UNICEF released a report detailing similar human rights abuses towards Palestinian children detainees. The report found that the ill-treatment of Palestinian children in the Israeli military detention system was “widespread, systematic, and institutionalized” and recommended that Israel implement a “series of practical safeguards that would improve the protection of children under military detention.”

This report follows another vocal denunciation of Israel’s policies toward Palestinian children prisoners.

“Israel’s use of solitary confinement against children flagrantly violates international human rights standards,” said Richard Falk, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the occupied Palestinian territories, in 2012. “This pattern of abuse by Israel is grave. It is inhumane, cruel, degrading, and unlawful, and, most worryingly, it is likely to adversely affect the mental and physical health of underage detainees.”

Source:

https://news.vice.com