Children

Amid heightened violence in late 2015, the number of Palestinian children detained by the Israeli authorities spiked to the highest figure since March 2009: at the end of December, 428 Palestinian children were in the Israeli prison system. Some 80 per cent of these children were in pre-trial detention, the majority of them facing charges of throwing stones.

“Every child has the right to protected access to education. Israeli authorities must ensure that this right is fulfilled, and that those responsible for attacks against defenceless children are brought to account”.

Nearly 425,000 children in Gaza are in need of immediate psychosocial and child protection support following this summer’s military operation. These include at least 3,373 children injured over the course of hostilities, some of whom will suffer permanent disabilities, more than 1,500 children who were orphaned, and hundreds of thousands who had their homes damaged or had to flee the fighting and move elsewhere, including tens of thousands still displaced. All of them need urgent support from the child protection and broader welfare sectors to regain a sense of normalcy and to deal with acute levels of psychosocial distress and vulnerability at a time when several neighbourhoods and villages of the Gaza Strip still lie in ruins.

On 12 June, three Israeli youths were abducted and later killed on their way home from a religious school (yeshiva) in two Israeli settlements in the southern West Bank. The Israeli authorities held Hamas responsible and identified three Hamas activists as the perpetrators; one of them was subsequently arrested.

The United Nations Resident and Humanitarian Coordinator for the occupied Palestinian Territory, Mr. Maxwell Gaylard, has encouraged the de facto authorities in Gaza to reconsider the decision of 12 July 2011 to dissolve the non-governmental organization Sharek Youth Forum.

Filippo Grandi, the Commissioner-General of UNRWA, today condemned the demolition of homes, and partial demolition of a school, by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) on 12 January in the Bedouin herding community of Dkaika, in the West Bank. He said: “I condemn this demolition in the strongest terms. Fifty people have been made homeless, including 30 children, many of whom were about to take an exam when the bulldozers arrived to destroy part of their school. Instead of sitting down to their exam, the children faced the traumatic scene of watching their homes and classroom be demolished. This is unacceptable.