"This rarely seen footage seen by The Independent offers a
glimpse into an Israeli interrogation, almost a rite of passage that hundreds of
Palestinian children accused of throwing stones undergo every year.
Israel has robustly defended its record, arguing that the
treatment of minors has vastly improved with the creation of a military juvenile
court two years ago. But the children who have faced the rough justice of the
occupation tell a very different story.
"The problems start long before the child is brought to
court, it starts with their arrest," says Naomi Lalo, an activist with No Legal
Frontiers, an Israeli group that monitors the military courts. It is during
their interrogation where their "fate is doomed", she says.
Sameer Shilu, 12, was asleep when the soldiers smashed in the
front door of his house one night. He and his older brother emerged bleary-eyed
from their bedroom to find six masked soldiers in their living room.
Checking the boy's name on his father's identity card, the
officer looked "shocked" when he saw he had to arrest a boy, says Sameer's
father, Saher. "I said, 'He's too young; why do you want him?' 'I don't know,'
he said". Blindfolded, and his hands tied painfully behind his back with plastic
cords, Sameer was bundled into a Jeep, his father calling out to him not to be
afraid. "We cried, all of us," his father says. "I know my sons; they don't
throw stones."
In the hours before his interrogation, Sameer was kept
blindfolded and handcuffed, and prevented from sleeping. Eventually taken for
interrogation without a lawyer or parent present, a man accused him of being in
a demonstration, and showed him footage of a boy throwing stones, claiming it
was him.
"He said, 'This is you', and I said it wasn't me. Then he
asked me, 'Who are they?' And I said that I didn't know," Sameer says. "At one
point, the man started shouting at me, and grabbed me by the collar, and said,
'I'll throw you out of the window and beat you with a stick if you don't
confess'."" (thanks Christina)
