Israel’s Bill to Legalize Prison for Children

By: Carlos Aznarez on August 17, 2016

The despotic regime that Israel imposes daily on the Palestine people is equivalent to what South Africa did during the years of Apartheid that was logically torn down by the international community. However, Israel and the Zionism that has controlled its government for years seem to have green light to carry out atrocities in the context of an occupation that is illegal in all aspects.

Not content with keeping over 7,000 prisoners in nightmarish prisons (including 560 children imprisoned only this year in Jerusalem), now they have defied rationality again by sanctioning, at the parliamentary level, a law that allows to detain children as young as 12 that are accused of committing crimes against Israel’s safety. In any other country of the world this would spark massive protests and the intervention of children’s rights organisms such as UNICEF. But Israel happily gets away with it.

The last repressive wave began last year, when a group of ultra-Zionist settlers accompanied by members of the military blocked the roads in Jerusalem and attempted to break into the Al-Aqsa Mosque. The security guards of the mosque and Palestinian youth resisted the attack and as a response, the attackers threw bombs inside the Muslim sacred site. That sparked multiple protests across the West Bank and in Gaza,

where the Israeli army brutally repressed the people, murdering Palestinians and detaining and torturing others, who are imprisoned to this day.

The Zionist government has difficulties to submit those who resist on the streets, and therefore it comes up with ideas as unreasonable as the one that the Congress is about to implement.

“If we must imprison every terrorist and their children, we will gladly do so, to secure peace”, said the Minister of Justice, Ayelet Shaked. She had previously become notorious for proposing to assassinate every Palestinian mother that gave birth to “little snakes”.

This and other similar proposals are supported by important sectors of the Israeli society. In a country where torture is legal, few people think it’s outlandish for 12-year-old children to be locked behind bars. So now, Palestinian children are at risk of being detained, questioned for over a month (as the dark “legal” system of zionism allows), submitted to all kinds of tortures and finally sent to those abhorrent prisons where hundreds of children have already been trapped. Children accused of throwing rocks or “attacking Israeli civilians or military personnel” may be subjected to all of this.

The bill also gives Israeli courts the freedom to “postergate the date of transferral of a condemned minor from a closed facility to a prison, to reduce the sentence of the condemned minor or cancel it”. With the new norm, while the Court examines the case of a minor, “the minor must remain imprisoned in a closed facility”.

The worst thing is that the children that are imprisoned might consider themselves lucky —many others are murdered unscrupulously by the military or the settlers.

Therefore, “the biggest democracy of the Middle East” (a cruel joke that Netanyahu likes to repeat), makes another move that makes Herodes seem soft. They are targeting those they fear the most: the Palestinian children, the future of the country, who due to the occupation have ceased to play with their friends and have the most feared weapon: their little fingers making the V for Victory.

http://www.thedawn-news.org/2016/08/18/israels-bill-to-legalize-prison-for-children/

Source: The Dawn