Palestinian institutions concerned with prisoners’ affairs, including the Prisoners’ Club, said that more than 1630 children from the West Bank, including al-Quds, and dozens from the Gaza Strip have been arrested by the occupation since the beginning of the war on Gaza. They pointed to the martyrdom of a child inside Megiddo Prison after being subjected to hunger, deprivation, and abuse. 350 of them are still in the occupation’s prisons, including two girls, in harsh conditions that completely contradict all international standards for the protection of minors. They face crimes of torture, starvation, and medical neglect, as well as sexual assaults, in addition to collective isolation and deprivation of visits.

Over the past decades, the usurping Jewish entity has carried out physical and psychological destruction against child prisoners through a set of systematic policies that contradict human values. Children have always been the most vulnerable group to its violations, whether through killing and injury, deprivation of education, or arrest, which has targeted tens of thousands of them, whether during raids, confrontations, at checkpoints and streets, or from schools. Children in Gaza were frequently used as human shields during its military operations.

The interrogation phase is considered the most brutal stage for children inside the occupation’s prisons; it aims to terrify them, break their will, and extract confessions from them. They are interrogated for long hours in closed rooms without the presence of their parents or a lawyer. They are deprived of sleep and rest, and subjected to continuous pressures that leave deep effects on them and their future. Administrative detention is considered one of the most repressive tools used by the occupation against the people of Palestine, especially children, without filing clear charges or presenting them to real trials, under the pretext of the “secret file,” which the child and his lawyer are denied access to.

Inside the prisons, children live under harsh conditions that lack the minimum humanitarian standards; they are subjected to beatings, electric shocks, deprivation of sleep inside what is known as the “disco room” (loud music), continuous shackling, dog attacks, verbal abuse, isolation, sexual harassment, and collective punishments. In addition, there is starvation, lack of hygiene, overcrowding and spread of insects, detention in poorly ventilated and unlit rooms, as well as medical neglect and lack of healthcare, which has led to the spread of diseases, shortage of clothing, deprivation of family visits, and detention with Jewish criminal children in a policy of systematic psychological and physical destruction.

On the other hand, data from the National Campaign to Retrieve the Bodies of Martyrs indicated a dangerous escalation in deliberate killing crimes against children alongside the continued policy of withholding bodies. Since the beginning of this month of November, the occupation has killed six children in cold blood and withheld their bodies, raising the number of child martyrs whose bodies are still withheld to 73 out of 752 martyrs whose bodies the campaign documents as still being held in the occupation’s refrigerators and cemeteries of numbers.

These statistics were published by prisoner institutions on the occasion of what is called “World Children’s Day,” in which the world celebrates the achievements of children in all areas of life, their development, and natural growth, while the children of Palestine face a repressive machine that targets them, violates their rights and dignity, kills them, arrests them, and tries them before military courts in which the simplest laws are violated, imposing harsh punishments far from what they claim about children’s and human rights. But Allah’s punishment is certainly coming:

[لَا يَغُرَّنَّكَ تَقَلُّبُ الَّذِينَ كَفَرُوا فِي الْبِلَادِ * مَتَاعٌ قَلِيلٌ ثُمَّ مَأْوَاهُمْ جَهَنَّمُ وَبِئْسَ الْمِهَادُ]

“Let not the [uninhibited] movement of the disbelievers throughout the land deceive you. * [It is but] a small enjoyment; then their [final] refuge is Hell, and wretched is the resting place.” [Surah Aal-i Imran: 196–7].