Ex-IDF officer admits to systemic brutality against Palestinian children
Friday, August 28, 2009
By: Andrew Gwozdziowski
End the occupation now!
In an interview with BBC, a former Israeli military commander, Eran Erafti, detailed the widespread abuse and torture of Palestinian youth by occupying Israeli soldiers.
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Children protest against Israeli
blockade of Gaza.
Gaza City, Nov. 2008.
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"You take the kid, you blindfold him, you handcuff him, he’s really shaking. ... Sometimes you cuff his legs too. Sometimes it cuts off the circulation."
The children, he says, are as young as nine or 10. Most of them are arrested for throwing rocks at the occupying forces. Showing great courage, they throw rocks at their illegal occupiers, heavily armed soldiers and tanks.
"He doesn’t understand a word of what’s going on around him." The commander said, "He doesn’t know what you’re going to do with him. He just knows we are soldiers with guns. That we kill people. Maybe they think we’re going to kill him."
The night-time arrests, he continues, are the most brutal. "Their faces were painted when they came for him. It was frightening. All those soldiers for one boy. They put iron weights on his back in the jeep and beat him all the way to jail. He couldn’t get up for a week."
Of the 9,000 Palestinians reported arrested last year by the racist apartheid state of Israel, 700 were children. These children are tried in military tribunals where anyone over the age of 16 is tried as an adult.
Mohammad Khawaja, who had just turned 13 when he was arrested said, "They dragged me from my home by the scruff of the neck. The more I cried the more they choked me. My mom was screaming. They pulled me along on my stomach. My knees were bleeding. They beat me with their guns and kicked me all the way to the jeep. They cuffed my hands and legs, blind-folded me and left me there for 24 hours. I thought I was going to die. Later interrogators wanted me to tell on other people. I wouldn’t. They beat me with plastic chairs. They told me to sign a paper written in Hebrew. I don’t read or speak it. Because I signed it they put me in jail."
Palestinian youth are standing up and fighting back against a colonial occupation supported by billions of dollars of aid from U.S. imperialism. They are fighting against far superior military power for a land that was brutally taken from them. They fight for the internationally recognized right of refugees to return to their homes. Socialists, progressives, and internationalists should stand in solidarity with the people of Palestine and support their heroic struggle to end the occupation.
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