The Israeli government has been faced with severe condemnation and denouncement as it makes attempts to pass a law that would sentence Palestinian children 12 and above to prison, by various groups including Hamas.
The bill, according to the group, “reflects the racist and brutal nature of the occupying regime,” it said in a statement on Saturday. ”
To hold Israel accountable for its crimes against Palestinian children, Hamas urged the international community to take concrete steps.
read more: Palestinian society suffers as a result of Israeli occupation
According to the statement, “the Israeli machine of aggression and terrorism has always exposed the Palestinian children to the most heinous crimes, which have to do with killing, arrest, abuse, and torture.”
The bill proposed by Yitzhak Kreuzer of the Otzma Yehudit party is anticipated to be discussed by the Ministerial Committee for Legislative Affairs of the Israeli Knesset (parliament) on Sunday. The proposed law permits the detention of the minors mentioned above on suspicion of taking part in retaliatory operations in occupied al-Quds.
An Israeli officer who was off-duty and his father were allegedly shot by a Palestinian teenager on January 28 in al-Quds, seriously injuring both of them. On Ma’alot Ir David Street, just outside the Old City of al-Quds, Muhammad Aliwat, a 13-year-old from Silwan, started shooting at a group of settlers.
Despite being wounded, one of the victims, an off-duty officer in the Paratroopers Brigade, is said to have managed to shoot and hit the assailant. Aliwat was injured and detained.
According to reports, Israeli prisons house over 7,000 Palestinian prisoners.
Without charge or trial, hundreds of prisoners have been held in what is known as administrative detention.
To protest their wrongful detention, Palestinian detainees have persistently engaged in indefinite hunger strikes.
Palestinian prisoners are held in Israeli prisons in appalling conditions with lax hygienic requirements. Additionally, Palestinian prisoners have consistently faced repression, harassment, and torture.
Human rights groups claim that Israel still tramples on the freedoms and rights guaranteed to prisoners by the Fourth Geneva Convention and other international laws.
Nearly 60 percent of Palestinian inmates held in Israeli jails, according to the Palestine Detainees Studies Center, have chronic illnesses; some of these inmates passed away while being held or soon after being released due to the severity of their conditions.
