Al Jazeera’s Nida Ibrahim spoke to Abdul Fattah Doleh, who served time himself in Ofer where he provided support for imprisoned Palestinian children, explained how they were treated.
The children who are in occupation prisons go through three different stages in jail, he said. The first stage is the arrest, in which the Israeli army comes out in force to take children “as they sleep with their stuffed animals”.
“The second they leave the house they are mistreated,” Doleh said. “That way when they reach the interrogation centre they confess whether or not they are guilty.”
The second stage is imprisonment and interrogation, during which “a large number of them were actually assaulted, a lot of them were sexually blackmailed and others were beaten”.
The final stage, he said, is the trial, in which children as young as 12 are brought in front of military courts.
Doleh described feeling helpless as he was shut away from the child prisoners every evening at 6pm, and heard them cry out for him and for their mothers, some continuing until the morning. “We try to treat them with as much humanity as we can muster, we try to tell them ‘Consider me your father, consider me your older brother,’” he said.
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