Geneva: A United Nations human rights watchdog has accused Israel’s police and military of abuses against Palestinian children ranging from torture to threats of death and sexual assault in prisons.

In a report on Israel’s record, the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child expressed its ‘‘deepest concern about the reported practice of torture and ill-treatment of Palestinian children arrested, prosecuted and detained by the military and the police’’.

The committee said soldiers arrested Palestinian youngsters regularly during night-time sweeps, tying their hands painfully and blindfolding them, and often transferring them to detention centres without informing their parents.

It also said that arrested Palestinian children were subjected systematically to physical and verbal abuse, threatened with death, physical violence, and sexual assault against themselves or members of their family, as well as having access restricted to toilets, food and water.