Israel has arrested 800 Palestinian children since start of 2017

The Israeli occupation authorities have arrested 800 Palestinian children since the start of this year, most of them from occupied Jerusalem, the Palestinian Prisoners’ Club (PPC) revealed on Wednesday. According to a report by Quds Net, the PPC said that 300 of these children, including 10 girls, are being deprived of being able to start the new school year because they are either still in prison or under house arrest.

Dozens of the children have been arrested several times. Some of them, explained the PPC, are unable to go to school because they have permanent disabilities resulting from the ill treatment to which they were subjected when they were arrested and investigated, including torture.

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In 2015, the Israelis arrested 1,332 Palestinian children, the highest number in any single year to-date. The PPC says that there is evidence that they were beaten, tortured, verbally abused, handcuffed and leg-chained, left without food or water in the detention centres for days and threatened in order to get them to “confess” to things they did not do.

Such treatment of children, insists the PPC, is a “flagrant violation” of international humanitarian law. Depriving children of the right to an education, for example, violates article 1/13 of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. It is also a violation of article 1/26 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and article 94 of the Fourth Geneva Convention, which gives and guarantees the rights of education for prisoners inside or outside prisons.