Child prisoner campaign

Imprisonment is a huge issue in Palestine. It is a very common experience for men in particular to be arrested by the Israeli military and imprisoned at some stage.

• There are currently about 10,500 Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails.
• International law governing the treatment of prisoners is commonly broken by Israel.
• Since 1967, over 650,000 Palestinian men have been arrested.
• About 40% of Palestinian men in the Occupied Palestinian Territories have had the experience of arrest. There are also women political prisoners.
• There are many Palestinian children arrested and taken to Israeli jails. They are not given their rights as juveniles.

In Abu Dis, there are currently about 70 prisoners from Abu Dis in Israeli jails, of whom about a third are children. As in the rest of Palestine, the provisions of the Fourth Geneva Convention and the Convention on the Rights of the Child are frequently broken in relation to these prisoners. Some prisoners are held under “administrative detention” and have not had a trial. Many of the prisoners report ill-treatment. Their families have great problems in visiting them.

Camden Abu Dis Friendship Association is working to make people aware of the issue of Palestinian prisoners and their human rights. We put the stories of prisoners on our website and in our books; we organise conferences, letter-writing meetings and special activities each year to mark the Day of Palestinian Prisoners, 17th April. In addition we focus in particular on child prisoners and campaign to raise awareness of the issue through our child-prisoner adoption campaign (letter-writing to support the prisoners and their families), and we work for individual cases through our urgent action campaigns in the case of some prisoners.