A story in 'The Australian' newspaper offers a glimpse into the makings of a UN report on Palestinian children detained by Israel, including a look into how Israeli pressure reportedly muffled the report's criticism.  The issue of Israel's treatment of detained minors has been gaining more and more attention in recent weeks. Aside from ongoing parliamentary debates in the UK, Israel's Channel 2 News aired a story on the nighttime arrests of child stone-throwers in the Al-Arub Refugee Camp (Hebrew), and we at +972 published Samar Hazboun's beautiful and horrific photo essay of children's testimonies from their detention. Both of these…

'Detained: Testimonies from Palestinian Children Imprisoned by Israel' uncovers one of the most painful experiences that Palestinian children endure in the ongoing Israeli occupation. Through interviews with ex-detainees and mothers of minors presently in detention, the project documents their stories and aims to lend a voice to those who are silenced from fear of negative repercussions. Text and photos by: Samar Hazboun Over the past 11 years, according to Defence for Children International, some 7,500 children have been detained in Israeli prisons and detention facilities. Muhammad Daoud Dirbas, at the age of six, was the youngest child to have been…

New Year's resolutions offer us a glimpse into the hopes of the children who live under Israeli occupation. A colleague of mine, a fellow journalist and writer, teaches English to Palestinian children in Hebron. I visited her recently in the West Bank and she generously shared her teenage students' New Year's resolutions. They are published here, sans names, with the students' permission. From a teenage boy: *Study hard *Be lovely *Don't hurt others *Work better *Keep your mouth closed *Imagine well *Never give up *Eat healthy food *Hate injustice *Like to help others *Smile *Fight bad insects The next one…

The different legal systems under which Israelis and Palestinians are tried apply to children as well. As +972 has consistently documented, Palestinian children arrested by the army are treated by the military court system as "potential terrorists." The visual below demonstrates what would happen should two 12-year-old boys, one Israeli and one Palestinian, get arrested for fighting. One would swiftly be brought before a judge, given access to a lawyer, tried and spared jail time. The other could face two years in jail without trial. This illustration is the eighth in a series of infographics on Palestinian civilian life under occupation.…

Israel Police yesterday shut down a Palestinian school in East Jerusalem for a period of a week. The school has over 1,200 students between the ages of 12 and 18 years old. The police justified their actions to the students and teachers by voicing suspicion that stones were thrown at settlers by students from the school. +972 magazine learned from students and teachers that the school doesn't allow students to throw stones from the school, but they cannot monitor students outside the school. It is unreasonable and unrealistic, a teacher said, "to be held responsible for individual students' actions outside the…

The following is a compendium of testimonies given by over thirty IDF soldiers who served in the West Bank and in and around the Gaza Strip in the years 2005-2011. Like previous publications by Breaking the Silence, it portrays daily events in the Occupied Territories. The testimonies in this anthology illuminate the realities of everyday life for Palestinian children and youth who live under Israeli occupation. Although the events described here took place after the peak of the Second Intifada, at a time perceived as calm and uneventful from a "security" standpoint, the reality that emerges from the testimonies shows…

A tragic accident causing the death of ten Palestinian children brought out the hateful side of Israeli Internet readers. This should be a wake-up call; the answer is not to conceal such speech from the public domain, rather to delegitimize it. By Ido Liven Rarely does my Facebook news feed keep me occupied for more than it takes to skim through it. But last week, a screenshot of a thread of comments under a headline from the popular news site Walla about the Palestinian school bus accident showed a list of loathsome comments. And it didn't take long until that…