ACTION ALERT: FREE THE CHILDREN OF PALESTINE!!

December 21, 2010 Al-Awda
         
According to Israeli police, 1200 Palestinian children have been
arrested, interrogated and imprisoned in the occupied city of
Jerusalem alone this year. The youngest of these children was
seven-years old.

Children and teen-agers were often dragged out of their beds in
the middle of the night, taken in handcuffs for questioning,
threatened, humiliated and many were subjected to physical
violence while under arrest as part of an ongoing campaign against
the children of Palestine. Since the year 2000, more than 8000
have been arrested by Israel, and reports of mistreatment are
commonplace.

Further, based on sworn affidavits collected in 2009 from 100 of
these children, lawyers working in the occupied West Bank found
that 69% were beaten and kicked, 49% were threatened, 14% were
held in solitary confinement, 12% were threatened with sexual
assault, including rape, and 32% were forced to sign confessions
written in Hebrew, a language they do not understand. Minors were
often asked to give names and incriminate friends and relatives as
a condition of their release.

Such institutionalized and systematic mistreatment of Palestinian
children by the state of Israel is a violation international law
and specifically contravenes the Convention on the Rights of the
Child to which Israel is supposedly a signatory.
               
         
ACTION

Al-Awda, the Palestine Right to Return Coalition calls on its
members, supporters and all people of conscience to please take a
moment to read and sign our petition at:
http://www.gopetition.com/petition/41467/sign.html 

Please ask your friends and contacts to do the same.

The petition demands that President Barak Obama direct Israel to
release all Palestinian children detained in its prisons and
detention centers immediately, and to end all forms of systematic
and institutionalized abuse that it practices against the children
of Palestine. What the Israeli state is doing to Palestinian
children amounts to psychological terrorism.  No person of
conscience can live with this stain on their lives.

Until Return,

                 Al-Awda, The Palestine Right to Return Coalition
                 PO Box 131352
                 Carlsbad, CA 92013, USA
                 Tel: 760-918-9441
                 Fax: 760-918-9442
                 E-mail: info@al-awda.org
                 WWW: http://al-awda.org

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