How Israeli impunity threatens Palestinian children

The death of an 18-month-old Palestinian toddler in an arson
attack on 31 July was wrenching evidence of the dangers faced by Palestinian children.
Some Israeli officials, like education
minister Naftali Bennett, are pretending that the problem is just a “tiny
group” of Jewish extremists who “represent nobody but themselves.” In fact,
those extremists are enabled by Israel’s culture of impunity for settler
violence, and abetted by Israel’s unlawful military policies. Palestinian kids
are suffering the result.

Israeli leaders have promised
to bring Ali Dawabshe’s killers to justice—echoing the promise they made last year after Israeli
extremists burned to death 16-year-old Mohammed Abu Khdeir. Abu Khdeir’s killers
are on trial, and a Jewish Israeli suspected of other violence is in
administrative detention—the form of detention without charge or trial that Israel
has inflicted on thousands of Palestinians.

Ali’s parents and his four-year-old
brother, Ahmed, were severely burned. It was not the first time that Israeli settlers
had attacked their village, Duma. Settlers have destroyed
350 olive trees in recent years. In December 2012, unidentified attackers set
two trucks on fire
and sprayed a sidewalk with a Hebrew phrase that named a settlement. Ali’s
father, Saad, died of wounds from the attack on 8 August—the same day settlers reportedly again threw
firebombs at another home in the village.

But Israeli leaders have announced
no plans to fix the culture of impunity that emboldens Israeli civilians to attack
Palestinians and Israeli soldiers to use excessive force against them. Because
of that impunity, the Israeli rights group B’Tselem has said it is only “a
matter of time” before more Palestinian children are killed.

Settlers attack Palestinians and
their property on a near-daily basis—there were more than 300 such attacks last year, but few attackers faced justice.
In the past decade, less than two percent of investigations into settler attacks
ended with convictions, the rights group Yesh Din found. Attacks since 2009 for
which the available evidence pointed to Jewish perpetrators but Israeli
authorities failed to charge anyone include nine arson attacks on
Palestinian homes, another on a family in a taxi, and dozens more on schools,
mosques and churches. The annual number
of attacks by settlers has nearly doubled since 2009.

Israeli security forces have failed to protect Palestinian
communities like Duma that are at known
risk of settler attacks and often stand idly by during the attacks.

The soldiers injure and kill far more Palestinians than settlers
do, though. In 2014, Israeli forces wounded more than 1,200
Palestinian children in the West Bank, often firing live ammunition as crowd
control, and killed thirteen children.
In 2013, Israeli forces killed
at least two children on or near school grounds. Yet only 2.4 percent of
military investigations into alleged unlawful harm by soldiers to Palestinians
of all ages lead to indictments.

Israel applies harsh military
orders to Palestinian children and tries them in military courts—unlike
settler children living in the same territory, who are subject to Israel’s
civil laws and courts. Israeli forces
arrest roughly 700 Palestinian children each year, including during nighttime arrest raids on their family
homes. In most cases, the soldiers do not notify their parents of where they
are holding the child. Ill-treatment of children detained by Israeli forces is
“widespread, systematic, and institutionalized,” UNICEF has reported, and can include
blindfolding and painful handcuffing with plastic ties; physical assault,
verbal abuse, and threats; denial of access to water, food, toilet facilities,
and medical care; and coerced confessions.

If charges are brought, the overwhelming majority of children are
held without bail, often for months.
And conviction rates
for Palestinian adults and children are high—99.74 percent in 2010,
when figures were last published.

The Israeli military also has repeatedly occupied and used
Palestinian schools for military
purposes, established firing zones in their vicinity,
and issued demolition orders for schools for which Israeli officials had denied
building permits. The US State Department reported
more than 160 settler attacks or military operations that directly affected Palestinian
schools, staff and students in the West Bank in 2013, according to UNICEF—yet earlier this year,
the US
reportedly pressured the UN to keep Israel off a list of countries that
abuse children’s rights in conflict. And
Israel’s discriminatory, pro-settlement policies put Palestinian economic
activity at a disadvantage and push hundreds of Palestinian kids to undertake
hazardous, badly paid work on Israeli
settlements. Ali Dawabshe’s father, Saad, had worked in the settlements, a
relative said.

Israel should ensure justice for the murders of Ali and Saad
Dawabshe. But Israeli policies must fundamentally change if other Palestinian
children in the West Bank are to have a future—to say nothing of the children
in Gaza, who face appalling conditions from the devastation caused during last
year’s hostilities and the grinding blockade imposed by Israel and Egypt.