Peace and Justice Post

No, not Labor. The British parliament is the one debating the treatment of underage Palestinian detainees by Israeli military tribunals.

Amira Haas, Haaretz, Dec 13, 2010

Labour Party representatives who had visited the Ofer military tribunal in the West Bank two weeks ago expressed shock over how the court conducts its hearings. In a parliamentary debate about detained Palestinian minors, they said that given a sample of 100 children, 69 said soldiers beat them and kicked them when they were being arrested. The children were better off pleading guilty regardless of whether they had done something, because if they were detained until the end of proceedings, this could be three times longer than their punishment, the parliamentarians said.

The Labour legislators cited data they had received from the Palestinian branch of Defense For Children International.

This is not the Israeli Labor Party. The visitors at Ofer were members of the British Labour Party. It was not Israel’s parliamentarians who spent an hour and a half debating a subject that shows the face of Israeli society, but rather their British counterparts.

In a debate December 7, Labour MP Sandra Osborne said that she and three of her colleagues had spent four days touring the West Bank under the auspices of the Council for Arab-British Understanding.

	A military Tribunal at the Camp Ofer prison near Ramallah.
	Photo by: Archive

“It was a visit to a military court … that shocked us to the core,” she said.

Another member of her faction, Richard Burden, added: “I thought that the area had lost its capacity to shock me.” But he realized he had made a mistake “when I saw the military court and what went on there.”

The visiting MPs were sitting in one of the caravans – the halls of the court – when they “heard a jangle of chains outside the door of the courtroom,” Osborne continued. “Army officers led child detainees into the military courtroom. The children’s legs were shackled, they were handcuffed and they were all kitted out in brown jumpsuits. One had to wonder if the soldiers felt threatened by 13- and 14-year-old boys.”

During the proceedings, she said, “The judge never once looked at the children or spoke to them.”

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