Torturing minors sign of bankrupt Israeli occupation

The Palestinian Committee of Prisoners’ Affairs says Israel tortures and humiliates an “overwhelming majority” of the Palestinian children it holds in its jails. Reacting to the news, journalist and political commentator Richard Silverstein has told Press TV that the inhumane treatment of Palestinian minors by Israeli prison guards provides proof of the bankruptcy of the occupation.


“This is yet another new development in the annals of the occupation, with nearly 400 children detained in violation of international law. We can compare this to other countries which the world considers to be violators of human rights, like North Korea. But very few countries, if any, mass incarcerate children in this way,” said Silverstein.

According to the political analyst, this issue indicates that Israel does not have anything to offer to its own citizens or to the world except “police and weapons and beating children. It’s a ghastly situation.” 

In September, the Palestinian Committee of Prisoners’ Affairs reported that at least 1,000 Palestinian children had been detained by Israeli forces since the beginning of the year.

Silverstein further stated there are two separate sets of laws in the occupied territories, one for  Israeli settlers and the other for Palestinians.

    “Israeli settlers are treated extremely leniently. They are hardly ever arrested. They are hardly ever sentenced to any prison time. And these are settlers who have killed Palestinians and maimed them and shot them and burned all of [their] groves and farmlands, and crimes like this. And they are treated almost as if they were national heroes; while the Palestinians can do something much less significant in terms of violation of law and they get much harsher sentences.” 

The commentator described this policy as “Israeli apartheid where they treat one nationality with leniency and the others with tremendous harshness.”

More than 7,000 Palestinian prisoners are currently held in some 17 Israeli jails, many of them arbitrarily.

Detainees have often resorted to open-ended hunger strikes in an attempt to make their voices heard about the administrative detention policy which Israel uses to incarcerate Palestinians without charge or trial for up to six months.