After months of media reports highlighting the role of children in the Palestinian intifada, the 2004 Global Report on the Use of Child Soldiers has found that this phenomenon remains the exception rather than the rule in Palestinian areas, although one which needs to be taken seriously.
The global report, to be issued by the Coalition to Stop the Use of Child Soldiers today to coincide with the UN Children’s day, indicates that all groups involved in the West Bank and Gaza Strip have had a history of child recruitment. This includes the military wings of Hamas, Fatah and the PFLP, as well as the Palestinian Authority and Israeli Occupying Forces.
However, “we can’t really talk in terms of the systematic recruitment of Palestinian children, although there are all sorts of serious issues about how children are treated by all sides,” said Victoria Forbes-Adam, project manager for the report.
In the case of militant groups, the report found that they have been involved in the recruitment of children for raids on Jewish settlements, have supplied children with small explosive devices, and in the worst cases, used children in suicide bombings on Israeli targets. However, while there have been at least nine documented suicide attacks involving minors, this remains a small fraction of the problem in other conflict zones such as Africa, where there are an estimated 20,000 children involved in active combat roles in Sudan alone.
Meanwhile, the report stated that both Israeli and Palestinian government forces have been implicated in the misuse of Palestinian children. While the Palestinian Authority has recruited some under-18s for its security forces, the Israeli Army and intelligence services have sought to recruit children as informers, often putting pressure on them to collaborate. The high level of child arrests has been important in this light, involving the detention of around 350 minors a year. Some of these children have reported torture and are often treated in ways that “fall short of international standards on juvenile justice,” said Forbes-Adam.
Ramallah-based Defense for Children International (DCI) has been one of the first local organizations to conduct a study on this phenomenon, which remains a sensitive issue in Palestinian society where under-18s make up around 53 percent of the population. “We don’t deny that this is a problem but we do feel that press reports sometimes exaggerate the scale of the issue while other parties have exploited it for political ends,” said DCI Director George Abu Al-Zulof.
He said that considering the level of Israeli violations against Palestinian children’s rights, through checkpoints, arrests, curfews and violence, the problem was remarkably limited, particularly when compared with other countries in Africa and even the UK and US, which were both implicated in the recruitment of minors in the global report.
Meanwhile, the work of groups like DCI in the West Bank and the Mezan Center for Human Rights in Gaza has led to increased awareness of the problem among Palestinian society. This has led to growing “willingness from a number of quarters, government, political and private, to oppose the use of children in conflict and put an end to this phenomenon,” said Abu Al-Zulof.
— Catherine Hunter is a free-lance reporter writing for a number of Arab newspapers. She has also worked for Dow Jones International and the Wall Street Journal.