For Palestinians arrested under occupation, a childhood disrupted

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Written by northsouth

Category: MENA

Published: 30 December 2023

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By Henriette Chacar

JERUSALEM - Fourteen-year-old Abdelrahman al-Zaghal was one of the youngest Palestinians released by Israel in exchange for hostages seized during the Oct. 7 Hamas-led raid on Israel.

Weeks later, his life still bears little resemblance to that of a normal teenager - he is recovering from serious injuries sustained the day of his arrest, and said his school is still awaiting Israel's permission for him to attend.

He was shot in August, when he said he left home to buy bread, only to wake up cuffed to a hospital bed, flanked by two police officers and with bullet wounds to the head and pelvis.

Israel charged Zaghal with hurling a petrol bomb, which he denies. His mother Najah said he was shot by a man guarding a Jewish settlement near their home in East Jerusalem.

A police statement released the night Zaghal was shot said Border Police officers shot at and critically wounded an unnamed teen after they sensed their lives were in danger.

As a Jerusalem resident, Zaghal's case went to an Israeli civil court. The judge ordered him placed under house arrest, but outside his neighbourhood, until the end of his trial.

The day of his release, Zaghal said he jumped for joy. But the celebrations were muted as he was about to undergo surgery for brain damage caused by the shooting, his mother said.

Among the 240 Palestinians released by Israel during a November pause in the Gaza war, Zaghal is one of 104 under the age of 18. In exchange, Hamas released 110 women, children and foreigners abducted on Oct. 7.

More than half the Palestinians released as part of the deal were detained without charge, Israel's records showed.

Since 2000, the Israeli military has detained some 13,000 Palestinian children, almost all boys between the ages of 12 and 17, said Defense for Children International-Palestine (DCIP).

"Everywhere a Palestinian child turns, there is the Israeli military to exert some kind of control over their life," said DCIP advocacy officer Miranda Cleland.

Israel says it arrests Palestinians on suspicion of attacking or planning attacks against its citizens. Its military said enforcement agencies in the occupied West Bank "work to protect the rights of minors throughout all administrative and criminal proceedings".

In the West Bank, Palestinians and Israelis are subjected to different legal systems. Palestinians, including minors, are prosecuted in a military court.

Based on collected affidavits from 766 children detained between 2016 and 2022, DCIP found about 59% were abducted by soldiers at night.

Some 75% of children were subjected to physical violence and 97% were interrogated without a family member or lawyer present. One in four are placed in solitary confinement for two or more days even before the beginning of a trial, said Cleland.

Lawyers work on getting children plea deals, she said, because the conviction rate is above 95%.

One of the challenges in post-release counselling is that teens expect to be re-arrested – and many are, said Dr. Samah Jabr, a psychiatrist who heads the Palestinian Health Ministry's mental health unit.

Zaghal said he had been detained by Israeli forces twice before. The first time, at 12, he said soldiers beat him with their rifles while he was playing with his cousin in Jericho. He said they accused him of hurling rocks, which he denied.

Throwing stones is the most common charge against Palestinian minors detained in the West Bank, punishable by up to 20 years in prison under Israeli military law, said Palestinian rights group Addameer.

Zaghal remembers going to swim at a Tel Aviv pool with his late father on the weekends, and wants to become a lifeguard. He said he loved school and was eager to go back.

Israel's Education Ministry said Palestinians released from Israeli detention would not attend its schools until January 2024 and would instead be visited by assigned officers.

It did not respond to Reuters questions on the reason for this decision.

Israel pushes deeper into Gaza camps, 12 weeks into war

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Written by northsouth

Category: MENA

Published: 30 December 2023

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By Nidal Al-Mughrabi and Arafat Barbakh

CAIRO/GAZA, 30 Dec.(ANA) - Israeli tanks pushed deeper into districts in central and southern Gaza overnight under heavy air and artillery fire, residents said, pressing a deadly offensive that has razed much of the enclave and that Israel has said may last months more.

Fighting late on Friday and early Saturday was focused in al-Bureij, Nuseirat, Maghazi and Khan Younis, backed by intensive air strikes that filled hospitals with injured Palestinians.

The bombardment has killed 100 Palestinians and injured 150 in the central Gaza Strip over the past 24 hours, a senior health official in central Gaza said.

At Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis, the biggest and most important medical facility in the south of the tiny, crowded territory, Red Crescent images posted online showed ambulances operating amid smashed streets, carrying injured children.

Almost all of Gaza's 2.3 million residents have been forced from their homes by Israel's withering 12-week assault, triggered by the Hamas attack on Oct. 7 that killed 1,200 people and brought 240 hostages into the group's grasp.

The offensive has killed at least 21,500 Palestinians, according to health authorities in Hamas-run Gaza, and the conflict risks spreading across the region, drawing in Iran-aligned groups in Lebanon, Iraq, Syria and Yemen.

Bombardment has smashed houses, apartment blocks and businesses and put hospitals out of action. On Saturday the Palestinian Culture Ministry said Israeli strikes had struck a medieval bathhouse. The old Great Mosque was hit earlier in the war.

Ziad, a medic in Maghazi in central Gaza, was planning to flee with his family of three children. The only road still open for them was the coastal route running past Deir al-Balah, already crammed with displaced.

But he said they would press on straight to Rafah, on the border with Egypt, fearing a new Israeli assault on Deir al-Balah, he said. "We want a ceasefire now. Not tomorrow even. Enough, more than enough, already," he said.

Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant said on Friday troops were reaching Hamas command centres and arms depots and pictures the military released showed soldiers moving across churned-up earth among ruins of destroyed buildings.

The Israeli military said it had destroyed a tunnel complex in the basement of one of the houses of the Hamas leader for Gaza, Yahya Sinwar, in Gaza City.

The U.S. has called for Israel to scale down the war in coming weeks and move to targeted operations against Hamas leaders, although so far it shows no sign of doing so.

On Friday U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken approved the sale of more artillery shells and other equipment to Israel without congressional review, the Pentagon said.

AID

Israel said on Friday it had facilitated the entry of vaccines into Gaza in coordination with UNICEF, the United Nations children's agency, to help prevent the spread of disease.

The little aid reaching the enclave since the start of the war, when Israel imposed a near total blockade on all food, medicine and fuel, has come across the border with Egypt.

Israel has only allowed access to the south of the enclave, where it started ordering all Gaza civilians to move from October, and aid agencies have said Israeli inspections have stopped all but a small fraction of needed supplies getting in.

An Israeli government spokesman said on Friday it does not limit humanitarian aid and the problem was with its distribution inside Gaza.

Al-Bureij, Nuseirat and Khan Younis are three out of eight Palestinian refugee camps in Gaza that in normal times receive services from the U.N. Relief and Works Agency. The agency cares for Palestinians who fled or were driven from their homes during Israel's creation in 1948 and live in slum-like camps in Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.

South Africa asked the International Court of Justice (ICJ) on Friday for an urgent order declaring that Israel was in breach of its obligations under the 1948 Genocide Convention in its crackdown against Hamas in Gaza.

It called on the court to issue short-term measures ordering Israel to stop its military campaign "to protect against further, severe and irreparable harm to the rights of the Palestinian people."

No date has been set for a hearing.

In a response, Israel's foreign ministry blamed Hamas for the suffering of Palestinians in Gaza by using them as human shields and stealing humanitarian aid from them. Hamas denies such accusations.

PALESTINIAN JOURNALIST KILLED

A Palestinian journalist working for Al-Quds TV was killed along with some of his family members in an air strike on their house in the Nuseirat camp in central Gaza Strip on Friday, health officials and fellow journalists said.

Gaza's government media office says 106 Palestinian journalists have been killed in the Israeli offensive.

The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) said last week that the first 10 weeks of the Israel-Gaza war were the deadliest recorded for journalists, with the most journalists killed in a single year in one location.

Most of the journalists and media workers killed in the war were Palestinian. The report by the U.S.-based CPJ said it was "particularly concerned about an apparent pattern of targeting of journalists and their families by the Israeli military."

Earlier this month, a Reuters investigation found an Israeli tank crew killed a Reuters journalist, Issam Abdallah, and wounded six reporters in Lebanon on Oct. 13 by firing two shells in quick succession while the journalists were filming cross-border shelling.

Israel has previously said it has never and will never deliberately attack journalists and that it is doing what it can to avoid civilian casualties, but the high death toll has caused concern even amongst its staunchest allies.

Palestinians stream into southern Gaza as Israel expands its offensive

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Written by northsouth

Category: MENA

Published: 29 December 2023

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RAFAH, Gaza Strip — Tens of thousands of Palestinians streamed into an already crowded town at the southernmost end of Gaza in recent days, according to the United Nations, fleeing Israel’s bombardment of the center of the strip, where hospital officials said dozens were killed Friday.

Israel’s unprecedented air and ground offensive against Hamas has displaced some 85% of the Gaza Strip’s 2.3 million residents, sending swells of people seeking shelter in Israeli-designated safe areas that the military has nevertheless also bombed. That has left Palestinians with a harrowing sense that nowhere is safe in the tiny enclave.

People arrived in Rafah in trucks, in carts and on foot. Those who haven’t found space in the already overwhelmed shelters have built tents on the roadsides.

“People are using any empty space to build shacks,” said Juliette Touma, director of communications at UNRWA, the U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees. “Some are sleeping in their cars, and others are sleeping in the open.”

Israel’s widening campaign, which has already flattened much of the north, is now focused on the urban refugee camps of Bureij, Nuseirat and Maghazi in central Gaza, where Israeli warplanes and artillery have leveled buildings.

But fighting has not abated in the north, and the city of Khan Younis in the south, where Israel believes Hamas’ leaders are hiding, is also a smoldering battleground. Militants have continued to fire rockets, mostly at Israel’s south.

The war has already killed over 21,500 Palestinians, most of them women and children, and sparked a humanitarian crisis that has left a quarter of Gaza’s population starving.

An additional 187 Palestinians were killed across the Gaza Strip over the past day, Ashraf al-Qidra, the spokesman for the Health Ministry in the Hamas-ruled territory, said Friday. The ministry’s death toll does not distinguish between civilians and combatants.

Israeli officials have brushed off international calls for a cease-fire, saying it would amount to a victory for Hamas, which the military has promised to dismantle. It has also vowed to bring back more than 100 hostages still held by the militants after their Oct. 7 attack on southern Israel that triggered the war. The assault killed some 1,200 people, mostly civilians.

The military says 168 of its soldiers have been killed since the ground offensive began.

A STREAM OF DISPLACED PEOPLE

The U.N. said late Thursday that around 100,000 people have arrived in Rafah, along the border with Egypt, in recent days. The influx crams even more people into one of Gaza’s most densely populated areas.

Israel has told residents of central Gaza to head south, but even as the displaced have poured in, Rafah has not been spared.

A strike Thursday evening destroyed a residential building, killing at least 23 people, according to the media office of the nearby Al-Kuwaiti Hospital.

At the hospital, residents rushed in a baby whose face was flecked with dust and who wailed as doctors tore open a Mickey Mouse onesie to check for injuries.

Shorouq Abu Oun fled the fighting in northern Gaza a month ago and sheltered at her sister’s house, which is located near Thursday’s strike

“We were displaced from the north and came here as they (the Israeli military) said it is safe,” said Abu Oun, speaking at the hospital where the dead and wounded were taken. “I wish we were martyred there (in northern Gaza) and didn’t come here.”

STRIKES IN CENTRAL GAZA

Residents said Friday many houses were hit overnight in Nuseirat and Maghazi and that heavy fighting took place in Bureij. The al-Aqsa Martyrs hospital in Deir al-Balah said it received the bodies of 40 people, including 28 women, who were killed in strikes.

“They are hitting everywhere,” Saeed Moustafa, a Palestinian man from Nuseirat, said. “Families are killed inside their homes and the streets. They are killed everywhere.”

Israel said this week it was expanding its ground offensive into central Gaza, targeting a belt of crowded neighborhoods that were built to house some of the hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees from the 1948 war surrounding Israel’s creation.

Israel blames the high death toll on Hamas, which it accuses of embedding inside the civilian population, saying that its forces have uncovered weapons troves and underground tunnel shafts in residential buildings, schools and mosques.

But even Israel’s closest ally, the United States, has urged it to take more precautions to spare civilians and allow in more aid. Israel says it warns civilians to leave areas that it is targeting in multiple ways and that it has worked to be more precise in its evacuation orders.

ISRAEL REVIEWS STRIKE ON REFUGEE CAMP

Civilians are bearing a staggering toll in the fighting. On Sunday, an Israeli strike on the Maghazi camp killed at least 106 people, according to hospital records, one of the war’s deadliest.

In a preliminary review of the strike, the Israeli military said that buildings near the target were also hit, and that “likely caused unintended harm to additional uninvolved civilians.” In a statement Thursday, the military said it regretted the harm to civilians and said it would learn from the incident.

Eylon Levy, a government spokesman, told Britain’s Sky News that the wrong munition was used in the strike, leading to “a regrettable mistake.”

“This should not have happened,” he said.

Israel seldom comments on specific strikes and has rarely acknowledged any fault even when civilians are killed.