Amal Nakhleh, young refugee from Palestine

By Roberto Morejón

Among the hundreds of Palestinian children and adolescents imprisoned in Israel is Amal Nakhleh, a victim of the well-worn modality of administrative detention, without the international corporate press denouncing his case or that of the other prisoners.

Amal was taken to a refugee camp in the occupied West Bank and became the longest-serving minor to be held in administrative detention.

Although an Israeli judge admitted that he had no evidence to convict the prisoner, State intelligence denied his release on the grounds that it had a secret file against him.

Family and friends believe that the Tel Aviv authorities successively renewed Amal's detention until his 18th birthday, on January 18, in order to treat him as an adult.

The maneuver does not constitute a fortuitous arbitrariness, since the Zionist regime detains hundreds of Palestinian children and adolescents every year.

This is denounced by relatives and organizations such as the Palestinian Prisoners' Society and the Palestinian branch of Defense for Children International.

According to the few leaked reports, Israel arrested more than 1,100 Palestinian minors in the first 10 months of 2021, most of whom were held in inhumane environments.

Survey results and other reports reveal that minors and youths captured in the West Bank and East Jerusalem have suffered beatings, verbal coercion and humiliating searches.

Victims report their experience in Israeli dungeons as torturous and dehumanizing.

As is to be expected, the humiliations have a severe impact on the lives of all, illegally subjected to military law.

They are deprived of the prerogative to attend schools and to have medical treatment if they require it, in one more edge of the ferocity of the repression of the Zionist regime in usurped Palestine.

Hence, the case of Amal Nakhleh is painful, though not isolated, but it "escapes" the supposedly inquisitive observation of the US State Department.

Washington is very wary of importuning its closest ally in the Middle East.

On the contrary, the United States conceives fables about alleged human rights violations in other countries, especially in those that refuse to accept the impositions of the North.