Monday, April 21, 2014

There is no state like Israel: it finds every and any report documenting its abuses to be unfair and anti-Semitic

" The Committee on the Rights of Children, a body of independent legal experts charged by the UN with the task of monitoring the protection of children’s rights in signatory states, has urged Israel to honour its responsibility to prevent the torture and ill-treatment of children.

“The Committee expresses its deepest concern about the reported practice of torture and ill-treatment of Palestinian children arrested, prosecuted and detained by the military and the police, and about the State party’s failure to end these practices in spite of repeated concerns expressed by treaty bodies,” the investigative body stated in its periodic review of Israel’s child rights record, released on Thursday.

It continued: “[Palestinian children are] systematically subject to physical and verbal violence, humiliation, painful restraints, hooding of the head and face in a sack, threatened with death, physical violence, and sexual assault against themselves or members of their family, restricted access to toilet, food and water.

“These crimes are perpetrated from the time of arrest, during transfer and interrogation, to obtain a confession but also on an arbitrary basis as testified by several Israeli soldiers as well as during pretrial detention.”

The report prompted a furious response from Israel, countering that the findings are “not based on any direct investigation on the ground, only on documents gathered from secondary sources.” "