The true monuments of Saddam Hussein's rule have been brought to light -- the mass graves, the torture chambers, the jail cells for children.
According to the international rights organization Defense for Children International, which handled two-thirds of juvenile cases brought before Israeli courts in2002 -2003, the great majority of children held in Israel are between 15 and 18 years of age. More than nine percent are 13 to14 -year-olds.
"Palestinian child detainees continue to be subjected to barbaric conditions, and often subjected to torture, particularly in Israeli military detention center, " it asserted.
Citing an example, the group said that in the Israeli Hawara detention center near Nablus, "a lawyer witnessed at first hand the ritual beatings and abuse handed out to new inmates in the prison yard before they are admitted into crowded cells, holding up to 12 other inmates."
The Defense for Children International added that at Atzion detention center "child detainees from the Hebron arrest campaign have reported beatings and positional torture, or shabeh.
I visited the Khan Younis refugee camp in the Gaza Strip...Barefoot boys, clutching ragged soccer balls and kits made out of scraps of paper, squatted a few feet away under scrub trees...out of the dry furnace air a disembodied voice crackles over a loudspeaker from the Israeli side of the camp's perimeter fence.
"Come on, dogs," the voice boomed in Arabic. "Where are all the dogs of Khan Youris? Come! Come!"
...
The invective spewed out in a bitter torrent. "Son of a bitch!" "Son of a whore!" "Your mother's c**t!"
The boys darted in small packs up the sloping dunes to the electric fence that separated the camp from the Jewish settlement abutting it. They lobbed rocks towards a jeep, mounted with a loudspeaker and protected by bulletproof armor plates and metal grating, that sat parked on the top of a hill known as Gani Tal. The soldier inside the jeep ridiculed and derided them. Three ambulances - which had pulled up in anticipation of what was to come - line the road below the dunes.
There was the boom of a percussion grenade. The boys, most no more than ten or eleven years old, scattered, running clumsily through the heavy sand. They descended out of sight behind the dune in front of me. There were no sounds of gunfire. The soldiers shot with silencers. The bullets from M-16 rifles, unseen by me, tumbled end-over-end through their slight bodies. I would see the destruction, the way their stomachs were ripped out, the gaping holes in their limbs and torsos, later in the hospital.
June 2003 July 2003 August 2003 September 2003 October 2003 November 2003 December 2003 January 2004 February 2004 March 2004 April 2004 May 2004 April 2007
Best New Blog finalist - 2003 Koufax Awards
A non-violent, counter-dominant, left-liberal, possibly charismatic, quasi anarcho-libertarian Quaker's take on politics, volleyball, and other esoterica.
Lo alecha ha-m'lacha ligmor, v'lo atah ben chorin l'hibateyl mimenah.
Cairo wonders when I'll be fair
and balanced and go throw sticks...