Children Behind Bars

DCI Palestine Section
: Issue 30

The boys at Beit Awwar school have almost forgotten what it is to have a normal day of classes. Their lessons are punctuated by the sound of military orders being barked in Hebrew metres away from the classrooms, and break times degenerate into tense standoffs as soldiers, armed with semi automatic weapons and tear gas canisters, stalk through the playground to deliver the latest threat to the headmaster. The teachers are in a state of despair - every visit from the soldiers leaves the boys aggressive, dispirited and distracted. Academic performance is declining and the syllabus is taking longer and longer to teach.

The reason for the constant interruptions lies less than 100 metres to the west of the school: Israel’s giant segregation wall. Hundreds of giant concrete slabs stretch across a field which until recently was de facto school property, blocking out the horizon of the hills beyond. Further north, the concrete gives way to a mass of barbed wire fences flanked by patrol roads. The land the other side is visible, but still inaccessible.

The wall came to Beit Awwar in September 2004, and from the moment the contractors arrived to clear a path for the barrier, several hundred metres east of where the green line actually lies, Beit Awwar school has been plunged into a cycle of misery. Soldiers patrolling the wall have repeatedly threatened to close down the school, claiming that boys are throwing stones from the building, or hiding there. Recently the threats have escalated, with soldiers warning they will use live bullets on any student seen playing soccer in the field between the school and the wall.

Schoolboys Zakariya and Nemer know only too well the danger the soldiers pose. On 22 March 2005, six months after construction first started on the wall, the 13-year olds were arrested for throwing stones at soldiers guarding workers near the wall. The soldiers caught the friends as they were going home after school; they kicked the boys, blindfolded them, tied their hands and put them into the back of a waiting jeep.

The boys were taken a military camp about a kilometre away - visible from the roof of their school. One of the soldiers brought a dog and threatened to let it off the lead so it would maul the boys, other soldiers passing kicked and hit them. Nemer and Zakariya were made to stand in the military camp all afternoon and evening before being taken to the detention centre in Gush Etzion - an illegal settlement between Bethlehem and Hebron.

The boys spent 16 days in Etzion, squashed into a cell with 17 other Palestinians aged between 13-20. The room was so crowded the boys were forced to sleep on the floor. To make matters worse they were only allowed out of the cell to use the bathroom once a day, and only then for half an hour. The remaining 23 hours and 30 minutes were spent locked in the room.

The boys’ first court hearing came on 27 March. The prosecutor in the military court told the judge that if they boys were adults he would insist on them receiving a 10-20 month sentence but, since they were children, he was asking ‘only’ for seven months each. The boys DCI/PS laywer, Khaled Quzmar, argued that as the boys were only 13-years old and had injured no one, they should not be given a custodial sentence, but should instead receive some alternative form of penalty such as house arrest or a fine. The judge refused both lawyers’ arguments, and sentenced Zakariya and Nemer to 90-days imprisonment, a 60-day suspended sentence and a fine of NIS 1,000 ($230) each. In a subsequent appeal hearing on 19 April, in which again the prosecutor petitioned for the boys to be given higher sentences, and their defence lawyer called for their immediate release, the appeal judge upheld the original sentence.

Nemer and Zakariya were sent to serve their sentence in the Telmond compound, where most Palestinian children charged with so-called ’security offences’ are sent. However unlike most Palestinian children who are placed in the Hasharon sections, the two friends were taken to Ofek facility which houses mainly Israeli juvenile criminals. “We were put in a cell together, not with Israeli kids” says Nemer. “But when we were allowed outside, we mixed with the other teenagers detained in Ofek.”

Since they were in Ofek, the boys had access to education which is normally denied Palestinian detainees. They were taught according to the Israeli curriculum and received two-hours a day of Hebrew, Arabic and maths. The food they received however was just as bad as that given to Palestinian children held in Hasharon: “It was really disgusting,” says Nemer. “Sometimes you’d find cockroaches in the food, and once I was sick after eating some chicken.” Zakariya was also ill while he was in prison. It took him several requests before he was able to see the doctor, and even then the only “prescription” he received was to be told by the doctor to drink more tea.

Zakariya spent a week of his sentence in solitary confinement. “I don’t know what I’d done to deserve it - there seemed to be no reason why I was put there,” he says. “The guards treated me like an animal - every time I asked for something they just kicked me.”
A week before the boys were due to be released, the guards started coming to their cell and telling them they would be freed the following day. “Each day they’d come to our door and tell us ‘tomorrow you’ll go home’, then tomorrow would come and we’d still be there,” says Zakariya. “Sometimes they’d tell us only one of us would leave, and then another guard would come and say we could both go home, but it wouldn’t be for 18 days. It was a really difficult week for us both, going from highs to lows over and over again.”
Finally they day came when they really were released. “We were taken to the DCO [checkpoint] near Tulkarem and left there, then we had to make our way back down to Beit Awwar - it was such a long journey,” says Nemer. “It was great to be home, to be with our families and friends again. But even though we weren’t away that long, it wasn’t that easy getting back into things. When we went back to school we felt like strangers. We’d missed all the lessons and didn’t know anything. It’s taken quite a long time to really feel at home again.