OCCUPIED JERUSALEM, (PIC)– Journalist for Haaretz newspaper Amira Hass said the Israeli occupation forces kidnap every year about 700 Palestinian children, many of them are rounded up from schools, at the pretext of throwing stones at troops and settlers.
Hass affirmed in a report on Friday that that 97 percent of those children complained about their exposure to torture and maltreatment, and 14 percent of them were sexually molested or received sexual threats from their interrogators.
The journalist explained that Israeli military courts started to deal with this issue two years ago when troops kidnapped a number of Palestinian children from Al-Arroub refugee camp on suspicion of throwing stones at passing cars in the area.
She said the soldiers claimed at first they caught the children red-handed throwing stones, but when they were questioned by lawyer Mahmoud Hassan who used facts to confront them, they confessed to not seeing the arrested children throwing stones at cars. They also confessed to kidnapping children from Al-Zira’iya school in the refugee camp, she added.