Over 600 Palestinian minors in Jerusalem placed under house arrest in 2022

RAMALLAH, Palestine (AA) – Israel has placed more than 600 Palestinian minors under house arrest in East Jerusalem in 2022, according to a Palestinian agency on Tuesday.

“Israel has widely used the policy of house arrest in Jerusalem this year,” the Commission for Detainees and Ex-Detainees Affairs said in a statement.

“Israeli occupation authorities use this policy as a punishment of Jerusalemite children under 14 as the Israeli law does not allow their imprisonment,” it added.

The commission called on human rights groups to support Palestinian children against Israeli arbitrary measures that “destroy their minimum life rights as stipulated in the Conventions on the Rights of the Child”.

According to the Palestinian Prisoner Society NGO, more than 9,300 Palestinian minors were detained by Israel since 2015.

Palestinian figures show that there are nearly 4,700 Palestinian detainees in Israeli jails, including 150 minors and 33 female detainees, along with 670 detainees held under Israeli administrative detention without charge or trial.

According to the Israeli Information Centre for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories, under the administrative detention policy, a person is held without trial without having committed an offense, on the grounds that he or she ‘plans’ to break the law in the future. As this measure is supposed to be preventive, it has no time limit. The person is detained without legal proceedings. This leaves the detainees helpless – facing unknown allegations with no way to disprove them and not knowing when they will be released.

The controversial policy is rejected by human rights groups and international rights organizations as a violation of human rights. The detention of children and minors under this policy is its most grossly inhuman manifestation drawing global outrage.