Hamas urges UN to add Israel to its ‘List of Shame’

In a statement on the occasion of the World Children’s Day on Sunday, Hamas urged the world body to pressure the Zionist regime for the immediate release of all Palestinian children being held behind Israeli bars.

The resistance movement also called on international human rights groups to protect the Palestinian children against Israel.

“The UN marks the World Children’s Day while the suffering of the Palestinian children, who are exposed to the most heinous forms of crime by the Israeli war machine and its systematic racist policy, is ongoing,” the statement read.

Elsewhere in the statement, it said about three dozen Palestinian children had been killed by Israeli forces during the current year and 160 others suffer from various forms of psychological and physical torture in Israeli prisons.

The Palestinian Prisoners' Society (PPS) recently said Israeli military forces had arrested more than 750 Palestinian children during arrest campaigns across the occupied West Bank and East al-Quds since the beginning of the current year.

The PPS in November 2020 highlighted rights violations committed by Israeli forces against minor Palestinian prisoners. The youth are often abducted from homes in the middle of the night, detained for hours without food or drink, and verbally abused. Israeli prison authorities also force the children into confession by threatening to torture them. Interrogations are done without the presence of a parent or a lawyer.

In May 2020, a study found that Israel had arrested up to 16,500 Palestinian children since the outbreak of the Second Intifada in late 2000.

The Detainees Affairs Commission of the Palestine Liberation Organization also revealed on Sunday that the Israeli regime had detained over 50,000 Palestinian children since the occupation of the West Bank and East al-Quds in 1967.