Holy Land: Soldiers detain eight year-old boy

Israeli solders arrested an eight year-old boy in Hebron, on the West Bank on Sunday, Christian Peacemakers have reported.

At 7pm on 16 June 2013, the CPT in Hebron received a phone call telling them that Israeli soldiers were questioning children whom they believed had been throwing rocks at the soldier on the roof near the CPT office. CPTers entered the street near their apartment saw the soldiers questioning two boys. The soldiers then left those two, saying that they were looking for another boy. The soldiers went around through the tunnels in the old city and returned to the area near the CPT offices. They then questioned another boy and demanded he go with them. The boy started to cry and an older man intervened, removing the boy from the custody of the soldiers. The soldiers then started to re-question the two boys that they had been talking to earlier.

CPTers took photos of the soldiers questioning the boys and a soldier threatened to break their cameras. They asked the soldier on the roof to identify the boy who threw stones. The soldiers told one of the boys to go away and put the arm around the other boy, who was approximately eight years old, and led him to the settlement of Beit Romano where there took him in behind the gate. A woman, who was a relative of the boy, came to the gate to see the boy. When soldiers would not let her see him, she was visibly distressed.

The soldiers then sat the boy on the pavement behind the gate as they continued to question him. More than an hour after they had detained him, the soldiers released him into the custody of the Palestinian Authority (PA) through Checkpoint 56. During the whole time that they held the boy, he did not have a parent, guardian, lawyer, or any sympathetic adult with him.

CPTers asked the soldiers why the boy had been taken and if he was going to be released. The soldiers said that they had taken the boy, because he had thrown stones at the soldiers and that they had given the boy a glass of water. The soldiers said that it is Israeli procedure to take children accused of throwing stones and question them before handing the children over to the PA. The Palestinian Authority released him into the custody of his parents.

According to Defence for Children International (DCI), an independent non-governmental organization based in Geneva, Switzerland, since the beginning of this year arrests of Palestinian children by the Israeli authorities have increased by seventeen percent. Human rights groups say that particularly in Hebron violations of international law with regard to the detentions and arrest of children happen on a daily basis.

Source: CPT