The Palestinian Prisoners Club said that it had documented Israel's arrest of 230 Palestinian children, from the beginning of this year until the end of last March.

The (non-governmental) club added - in a report issued on the occasion of the Palestinian Child’s Day, which falls on tomorrow, April 5 of each year - that the occupation authorities continue to arrest about 140 children under the age of 18, including two boys who are under administrative detention, and they are Amal Nakhla. From Ramallah and Faisal Al-Arouj from Bethlehem, the child prisoners are in 3 central prisons, namely “Ofer”, “Megiddo” and “Damon”, and the highest percentage of them are in “Ofer” and “Megiddo” prisons.

On April 5 of every year, the Palestinians observe the Palestinian Children's Day, through activities, cultural, educational and media activities;

With the aim of advocating for Palestinian children "who lack the most basic rights due to the Israeli occupation," according to the official news agency "Wafa".

The Asir Club stated that "the arrests were concentrated in the occupied city of Jerusalem," as the occupation tried - over the past few years - to convert the homes of children's families in Jerusalem into a "prison", and this issue left great challenges in terms of the relationship between children and their families, and at the community level in Jerusalem".

The club pointed out that "often the detainees are released either on bail, or transferred to house arrest," without indicating the numbers of those who were released.

He added that "imprisoned children are subjected to forms of abuse, including being kept without food or drink for long hours, insulting them, and detaining them in harsh conditions."

There are about 4,400 Palestinian prisoners in Israeli prisons, including 39 women, and about 350 administrative detainees (without charge), according to official Palestinian data.

Escalation despite the epidemic

The club's report said that over the past years - and specifically with the beginning of the popular uprising in 2015 - the occupation authorities have escalated the rights of children, "as the number of arrests in the ranks of children in 2015 reached two thousand, most of them in Jerusalem, which is the highest rate of long arrests. Children since 2015 until today, where the number of arrests among children - from 2015 until the end of March 2021 - more than 7 thousand and 500 children were arrested, and a part of the children - who were arrested in 2015 and after, were sentenced to high sentences. I arrived for years or were sentenced to life in prison - they went beyond childhood in the occupation prisons. "

Since the beginning of the Corona epidemic - despite the calls made by human rights organizations for the release of children - the occupation authorities have continued to arrest children, according to the report, which considered that the authorities “used the epidemic as a tool to abuse, pressure and intimidate them, as children prisoners with the epidemic are subjected to the same measures. That the adult prisoners are exposed to. "

The report of the Prisoner's Club adds that the children's departments do not have the necessary preventive measures, as children were subjected to "double isolation, as are all prisoners, and were prevented from visiting family and lawyers, especially in the first period of the outbreak of the epidemic, which caused them great crises and pressures at the level of detention life." ".

The report goes on to say that "the majority of children who are prisoners due to the epidemic have been deprived for several months of seeing their families," and the prison administration refuses to allow them "to communicate with their families by making phone calls, despite repeated requests for this," according to the report.

The child prisoners were not excluded from the classification processes imposed by the occupation, according to the report, “The occupation applies military law against children in the West Bank, while it applies its exceptional measures in Israeli civil law to Jerusalem children, as part of the classification policies that it tries to impose on the Palestinians. About their administrative detention, under the pretext of having a secret file. "