Wisam Marwan Tamimi, then 16 years old, was arrested on June 9 in the West Bank town of Nabi Saleh, 20 kilometers from Ramallah, and taken to a headquarters of the Israeli intelligence agency, of disastrous memory for those who have ended up there. : Al Masqubiyya interrogation center in Jerusalem. In a cell in that place where organizations supporting Palestinian prisoners have been denouncing torture for years, this final year high school student spent 45 days in total isolation. Without a lawyer and without his parents having any news about him. “He had never had any problems with the law,” explains his aunt, Manal Tamimi, from the living room of her house. After that month and a half in complete solitude, this teenager was transferred to the Israeli maximum security prison of Ofer, in the occupied Palestinian territory of the West Bank. Wisam Tamimi is one of the minors who appear on the list of 300 Palestinian prisoners, of whom at least 150 could regain their freedom due to the exchange of Israeli hostages announced this Wednesday by Israel and Hamas.
Manal Tamimi believes it is possible that, as in the case of her nephew, “the majority” of the young people who will now be released by the agreement sponsored by Qatar “have been detained for nothing,” with charges “fabricated by the Israelis,” as she underlines. It happened with Wisam, whose only crime, he maintains, is that of being Palestinian and having the last name Tamimi, “which is a crime in itself for Israel.” This woman’s family gained international notoriety when the daughter of one of her cousins, Ahed, then 16 years old, spent eight months in prison in 2017. The girl had slapped two soldiers who were two heads taller than her and who were trying to take his 14-year-old brother into custody. This altercation was reflected in a video that later went viral.
On November 6, Ahed Tamimi, now 22, was also detained. Her name is not on the list of Palestinian prisoners who will potentially benefit from the exchange. This list only includes those arrested before October 7, 30 of them women, and a few adult men, most of them 18 years old, so it is possible that they were detained when they had not yet turned 18.
Wisam’s aunt remembers that, eight days before his arrest, Israeli soldiers had “fractured the boy’s skull” with a tear gas grenade that they threw against the roof of his uncles’ house in Nabi Saleh. That June 1, he says, the Israeli military “had killed a two-year-old boy from the village with a shot in the neck when shooting at his family’s car.”
“When we heard the shots, we went up to the roof to see what was happening and then the soldiers started throwing tear gas grenades at us. One of them injured Wisam in the head,” says the woman, showing on her mobile a video in which a Palestinian Red Crescent health worker is seen wiping away blood from a deep wound in the teenager’s skull, who spent five days in the hospital. Three days after he was discharged, “the soldiers came and took him into custody,” says his aunt. No explanations, no charges and no arrest warrant. Her nephew, the woman says, did not have access to a lawyer until 45 days later, when he was transferred from Al Masqubiyya to Ofer prison.
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Since Wisam Tamimi was arrested in June, his parents “have only been able to visit him once or twice and see him in court for five minutes.” The family gave his jailers the medications he needed to treat the skull fracture he had suffered, his relative explains, only to discover “that they had not been given them.” Since October 7, neither this minor nor the rest of the Palestinian prisoners have been able to receive visits, says Manal Tamimi.
Youth
From the list of 300 minors and women, from which the first 150 prisoners will emerge who should be exchanged for 50 of the 240 hostages in Gaza, it was surprising to see how young some of them are: there are several 14-year-old children. Also the accusations made against them, which range from serious charges such as “attempted murder” or “support for terrorism” to crimes that range from ambiguity – “damage to the security of the area” or “membership in an unknown organization” — and the banality of one of the most recurring accusations: “throwing stones.”
At the end of September, the Israeli prison service declared that it had 146 Palestinian children and adolescents in its custody in detention centers, prisons or what it cryptically called “safety zones,” according to a statement from the NGO B’Tselem. That figure has since multiplied by more than three, with the addition of the 350 minors under 18 years of age detained in East Jerusalem and the West Bank since the Hamas attack against Israel, explains by telephone from the West Bank city of Bethlehem Abdallah Zgari, the president of the Club of Palestinian prisoners. The minors arrested represent more than 10% of the total of 3,000 detained in the occupied territories as of October 7, according to that NGO. In total, Israeli prisons now house 8,300 Palestinians, of whom 500 are minors.
The two imprisoned Tamimi family youths, Wisam and Ahed, were at least formally charged in court, a right not always enjoyed in Israel. In that country, there is a legal figure defined as “administrative detention”, which allows anyone to be arrested without having done anything. Literally. It is enough for someone to be suspected of planning to commit a crime in the future to send them to prison. This type of imprisonment has no time limit and can be renewed every six months up to “ten years in prison,” says Abdallah Zgari.
The victims of this legal figure are detained without judicial procedure, by order of the regional military commander, and on the sole basis of classified evidence that is not revealed to the accused. Thousands of Palestinians find themselves in prison without knowing what they are accused of or if they will finally be tried. They also have no idea when they will regain freedom. Since October 7, of the 3,000 Palestinians arrested, 1,200 have been placed in administrative detention, explains the president of the Palestinian Prisoners Club. That number has been added to an identical number of those who were already held in this way before the Hamas attack. In total, 2,400 prisoners, Zgari emphasizes. Before that attack, at the end of September, there were also 23 minors in administrative detention in Israeli prisons, estimates the NGO B’Tselem.
According to Unicef data, since 2000, 13,000 Palestinian children have been detained, interrogated, tried and imprisoned. Many had to receive medical treatment during their arrest (1,598 in the last decade), suggesting that they suffered some form of mistreatment.
The arrests of Palestinian adolescents and young people “did not begin with October 7,” emphasizes Manal Tamimi, who highlights the abyss that separates the treatment accorded to Palestinians and Jewish settlers in the territories occupied by Israel: “Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza are subject to military law, while settlers living next door are tried under civil law. If two children, one Palestinian and the other a settler, throw stones at each other, the Jew will be kept in good condition until his parents come to take him home. The Palestinian child will be taken to a detention center, where he will be interrogated for hours and deprived of all his rights, such as being accompanied by a parent, being assisted by a lawyer or having his interrogation recorded on video,” he emphasizes. the activist. This double standard is one of the reasons why Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch accuse Israel of subjugating the Palestinians by imposing an apartheid regime on them.
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