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7.1 Arresting and Breaking the Body

7.1 Arresting and Breaking the Body

In this chapter, I will begin with the subject of arrest. Arrests and the practice of interrogation/torture processes that follow are very much commonplace and overlap regardless of gender or age. Hence, in this section, I focus on the arrest of children as they are the most vulnerable in the system of slow erasure the Israeli state enforces.

Palestinian youth are often targeted for arrest in communities that are located close to Jewish-only settlements, Israeli military installations, or roads frequently used by the Israeli army and settlers. Arrests typically occur during night-time raids at homes, at demonstrations, or near military checkpoints, the separation barrier, and other military infrastructure (Defense for Children Palestine 2016)2. Most children are arrested or detained at home or at a military checkpoint, although this varies between girls and boys. Girls were more likely to being detained at checkpoints, while most boys were taken from their homes (Defense for Children Palestine 2016)2. These areas, heavily populated with soldiers and settlers, heighten the vulnerability of Palestinian children to arrest. While in the West Bank both the Israeli military and police have the authority to arrest minors, it is predominantly the military that carries out these arrests, whereas the police usually conduct the interrogations. In East Jerusalem, both the arrest and interrogation/torture are conducted by the Israeli police. Addameer, the Prisoner Support and Human Rights Association, has documented extensive testimony of Palestinian children subjected to arbitrary arrest and torture. For example, Islam Dar Ayyoub and Rama al-Ja’abees were both arrested as minors and describe their experiences firsthand.

Islam Dar Ayyoub [15] was arrested in the early hours of 23 January, when the Israeli forces entered his house at 2 a.m., asking for him. He had already been arrested earlier that month and held for several hours at Halamish settlement before being released. The family’s house had also been targeted twice that month for ‘mapping’ by the Israeli forces: an operation in which soldiers enter the house in the middle of the night, wake up its inhabitants and take photographs and ID numbers of all the men and children living there. On this occasion, Islam had thought the army had come to arrest his older brother, Omar, but instead the Israeli army forced Islam onto the ground and applied plastic handcuffs, without giving an explanation for his arrest. When his family tried to stop the soldiers, they were all beaten. Islam was blindfolded and taken by military jeep to Halamish settlement. He was without shoes and thrown to the ground and left there for several hours, all the time not knowing where he was. (Addameer 2011)3

On 20 February 2015, the occupation police forces arrested 14-year-old Rama al-Ja’abees from Salah al-Deen Street in East Jerusalem. The Israeli police forces claimed that Rama possessed a knife. Her age did not prevent her from being harshly beaten during arrest. Rama was then transferred to al-Mascobiyya interrogation center where she spent three days. Rama spent that time in the same room, with her hands and legs cuffed, and with three different interrogators. (Addameer 2018)4

Both testimonies highlight how the Israeli military and police exert control over Palestinian spaces, homes, streets, and detention centres. Islam’s home was raided multiple times, not just for his arrest but also for ‘mapping,’ a surveillance practice that disrupts domestic life and reinforces a sense of constant insecurity, which underscores how entire families experience collective punishment.

Children describe the shock of being woken up and detained at night, which compounded the distress they experienced during transfer and interrogation. They often feel “disoriented,” “confused,” and “exhausted.” Many of the children arrested at night report that they were not allowed to sleep before being interrogated (Save the Children 2020)5. Once arrested, the child is at the mercy of its torturers, often soon after being taken into the interrogation room.

Rama’s arrest on Salah al-Deen Street, a key thoroughfare in East Jerusalem, demonstrates how even public spaces are sites of vulnerability. This illustrates how military occupation does not just manifest in physical barriers but also through the militarisation of everyday spaces, turning them into sites of surveillance, fear, and control.

Both cases reveal how Palestinian children are framed as security threats. Islam, a 15-year-old boy, was arrested in a manner that mirrors the treatment of adults, violently subdued, blindfolded, and abandoned in an unfamiliar space. Rama, a 14-year-old girl, was accused of possessing a knife, invoking a discourse that legitimises police brutality against minors under the guise of counterterrorism. This tactic is not just about arresting individuals but about maintaining long-term psychological control over entire communities. Rama’s solitary confinement and prolonged interrogation reveal the use of isolation as a method of psychological warfare, denying detainees the emotional support of their families. Islam was not even told why he was being arrested, and his physical mistreatment (being left without shoes, thrown to the ground) exemplify a dehumanising logic in the settler-colonial approach. Rama’s interrogation by three different officers while bound further shows how the system does not view Palestinian children as deserving of legal protection or basic rights.

Yet invoking international law here feels ironic, these frameworks, while ostensibly designed to prevent torture, are themselves entangled in colonial logic, as evidenced by scholarly contributions from Ibrahim J. Gassama (Gassama 2018)6, Robert J. Miller and Olivia Stitz (Milner and Kedar 2023)7, and Elya Milner and Alexandre Sandy Kedar (Milner and Kedar 2023)7, and described in Chapter Four where I wrote on genocide. Nonetheless, despite my inclination towards reforming international law to embody a more equitable paradigm, the lamentable reality of entrenched inequality necessitates, at least for the present moment (with a cautiously optimistic eye towards a shifting paradigm), that I interpret these events through the lens of slow erasure.

The mass incarceration of Palestinians, from children to the elderly, can be viewed as part of a larger strategy within the framework of settler-colonialism to further the process of ethnic cleansing through the slow erasure of the Palestinian identity and bodily agency. The spaces in which power is exerted onto Palestinians can non-exclusively be divided between those where Palestinians are the target within the daily spaces of the home and the street and those where the power individuals is more total, namely in the confined space of arrest, within interrogation/torture1 and prison systems.

References

  1. As the process of torture happens mostly within the interrogation sessions, I will not make a separate distinction will be made between the processes of torture and interrogation. ↩

  2. Defense for Children Palestine. 2016. No Way to Treat a Child: Palestinian Children in the Israeli Military Detention System. Defense for Children International - Palestine. ↩↩

  3. Addameer. 2011. "Islam Salah Dar Ayyoub Tamimi." In Addameer. Https://www.addameer.org/prisoner/islam-salah-dar-ayyoub-tamimi. ↩

  4. Addameer. 2018. "Rama Al-Ja'abees." In Addameer. Https://www.addameer.org/prisoner/rama-al-jaabees. ↩

  5. Save the Children. 2020. Defenceless: The Impact of the Israeli Military Detention System on Palestinian Children. Save the Children. ↩

  6. Gassama, Ibrahim J. 2018. "The Palgrave Handbook of African Colonial and Postcolonial History." In The Palgrave Handbook of African Colonial and Postcolonial History, edited by Martin S. Shanguhyia and Toyin Falola. Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-59426-6\_23. ↩

  7. Milner, Elya, and Alexandre Sandy Kedar. 2023. "Squaring the Circle: Settler Colonialism, the International Law of Occupation and the Separation Barrier." Political Geography 105: 102929. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2023.102929. ↩↩