RAMALLAH – The Palestinian Authority on Monday said that Israeli security forces arrested thirty-one Palestinian children in the second half of February. The Palestinian Ministry of Information said that the Israeli soldiers wounded several of them during the arrest campaigns in West Bank areas. The ministry said that the Israeli forces arrested the Palestinian children in occupied Jerusalem, Hebron, Nablus, Bethlehem and Qalqilyah. It added that the children were transferred Israeli prisons and detention facilities where they are held under difficult and painful circumstances. Meanwhile, the Palestinian researcher and expert in prisoners' affairs Abdulnasser Farwaneh said that Israel is holding 187 Palestinians under the age of 18. Two Israeli human rights organizations criticized last February the new statistics on treatment of Palestinian minors revealed by the Israeli army's chief prosecutor in West Bank. Attorney Emily Schaeffer of Yesh Din, Volunteers for Human Rights, told the daily Jerusalem Post that “the number of incidents of abuses committed by Israeli army personnel greatly exceeds that of complaints filed.” Schaeffer emphasized the difficulty of “providing testimony about a traumatic incident to an investigator” who wears “the same uniform as the alleged abuser.” She added that most Palestinians knew that “the majority of complaints filed to the MPCID (Israeli Military Police Criminal Investigation Department) do not result in indictments.” Schaeffer cited 2012 statistics that only 32.5 percent of complaints filed with the MPCID led to criminal investigations, and none resulted in indictments. Also on February, Amnesty International called on the called on the international community to suspend transferring arms to Israel to protest its treatment of Palestinians in the West Bank. “Suspend transfers to Israel of munitions, weapons, and related equipment including crowd control weapons and devices, training and techniques,” Amnesty International said in a 74-page report titled “Trigger- Happy: Israel's use of excessive force in the West Bank.” The report provided case studies of 22 Palestinian civilians killed by the Israeli army since January 2011, of which most were under the age of 25 and four were children. According to Amnesty, at least 14 of the deaths occurred during protests against Israel. It noted that according to the UN, the Israeli army killed 45 Palestinians in the past three years. According to Amnesty, the Palestinians who were killed did not appear to pose a direct and immediate threat to Israeli soldiers in the 22 cases listed. It added that “in some, there is evidence that they were victims of willful killings, which would amount to war crimes.” The report further stated that in that same three-year period, Israeli forces in the West Bank seriously injured 261 Palestinians, including 67 children, by firing live ammunition at them. It said soldiers wounded another 8,000 Palestinians, including 1,500 children, by other means, including rubber- coated metal bullets and teargas.
