Jaber Hmeidat says his sons, aged 9 and 12, left their home in the hills south of Hebron earlier this week to search for akoub, a wild artichoke-like vegetable currently in season.
He was therefore surprised to learn that the children had been detained by Israeli forces.
“They were terrified,” he said in an interview Thursday the day after their arrest. “They could not sleep all night.”
The father of nine said on Thursday that he tried to reassure his children and explain that what had happened was part of life for Palestinians living under Israeli occupation.
“I worked so hard to raise their spirits,” he said.
Hmeidat added that the incident angered him and said he would have tried to intervene if he had been present.
“I would not have allowed them to take the children, it would have been over my body,” he said.
Nasser Nawaj’ah
The video of the incident was widely circulated on social media and angrily shared by activists as the latest insight into Israel’s handling of Palestinians.
Israeli rights group B’Tselem, which published the video, said five boys, aged between 8 and 13, were detained by the Israeli army on Wednesday after choosing an acupuncture near an outpost in the occupied West Bank. .
Israeli police said in a statement that the army had detained four minors for allegedly breaking into private property and stealing parrots and other objects. The Israeli army said a group had been spotted entering private property in the southern Hebron area and had been handed over to Israeli police by a military patrol after a brief initial interrogation with police. Police said they did not detain the children after being transferred by the IDF and that they tried for several hours to track down their parents before picking them up.
But while the exact circumstances of the children’s detention remain unclear, the incident provides a window into the realities of life under Israeli occupation, say rights groups and some Palestinians.
Whether they were simply picking wild vegetables or allegedly stealing parrots, they argue, there is no reasonable scenario in which children up to 8 years should be detained by armed soldiers.
“It first shows the absolute disregard of the Israeli authorities for the well-being of Palestinians,” Amit Gilutz, B’Tselem spokesman, said.
“Palestinians are constantly being dehumanized,” he said.
Gaby Lasky, a human rights lawyer representing the children, said they were released five and a half hours after they were detained by the Israeli army on Wednesday. The two elders, who are 12 and 13, were ordered to return for questioning next week, she said.
Israeli police said two boys were called along with their parents for stealing the parrots and other objects.
According to UNICEF, the age of criminal responsibility under Israeli military law governing Palestinians living in the West Bank is 12.
Lasky told NBC News that the children said they did not steal anything.
“It was really a matter of telling the boys to go back home or pull away a little bit, and that’s it,” she said. “Their detention was humiliating.”
Video image published shot by B’Tselem and by Israeli activists, it appears that the children are picking plants and putting them in buckets.
Separate footage later one day shot by a field researcher from B’Selem, it appears that armed soldiers detained and handled young boys – apparently the same children – in a white military vehicle as bystanders. At one point, an older child tries to pull one of the children out of one soldier’s grip, only to be snatched away by another.
It was unclear what could have happened in the time between the two videos.
According to B’Tselem, the children were arrested near Havat Maon, an outpost that is illegal under Israeli law. According to Peace Now, a group campaigning for an independent Palestinian state, there are dozens of these outposts in the West Bank, in addition to 130 officially recognized settlements.
The Palestinians consider all settlements illegal and are a major obstacle to their goal of establishing an independent state that includes the West Bank, which Israel captured in the 1967 war.
Most of the international community regards the Palestinian territories as occupied and also considers the settlements largely illegal and an obstacle to peace. However, US officials had already begun dropping public references to the West Bank as ‘occupied’ in 2017, and in 2019 the US reversed its decades-long position that Israeli settlements in the West Bank were illegal.
Seven hundred Palestinians under the age of 18 were arrested by the Israeli authorities in 2020, according to Khaled Quzmar, the general director of Defense For Children International-Palestine, a group working to defend the rights of Palestinian children. It was not clear if this included children detained in this incident.
According to B’Tselem, at the end of September, more than 150 Palestinians under the age of 18 were detained in Israeli prisons, as well as prisoners.
“Children are the main victim of the occupation,” Quzmar said. “They pay the price of the profession every day of their lives.”
Saphora Smith reports from the UK and Lawahez Jabari from Jerusalem.
