Many of the Palestinian children detained are not allowed to have contact with family or friends during their incarceration.



Many children also reported facing harsh treatment in detention, and with an estimated 500-700 Palestinian children a year being detained and prosecuted in Israeli military courts, their remains an immense need for trauma counseling.



The Young Men's Christian Association (YMCA) is one organization which is running a post-trauma rehabilitation programme for ex-detainee children since May 2009. Most of these 500-700 Palestinian children from the West Bank are aged 12-17, and are detained mostly on charges related to throwing stones.



Nader Abu Amsha, the director of the YMCA rehabilitation programme in Beit Sahour claims that “These children go through a very painful time. They are often deprived of sleep, humiliated and forced to confess that they did something wrong."



He is not alone in his assessment, as a new report released by the group Defense for Children International-Palestine Section (DCI-Palestine) also points to widespread ill-treatment of Palestinian minors in Israeli military detention.



The report, called ‘Bound, Blindfolded and Convicted: Children held in military detention,’ is based on 311 testimonies from children who were detained. DCI-Palestine reported that 75 percent of the children reported that they suffered some form of physical violence.



The report stated that "Most children undergo coercive interrogation, mixing verbal abuse, threats and physical violence, generally resulting in a confession."



The UN Children's Fund (UNICEF) has criticized the Israeli practice of detaining children as unlawful, in particular because of its frequent use and the long period of detention, lasting up to eight months.



According to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, the detention of children should be used only as a measure of last resort and for the shortest appropriate period of time.



It has been reported that the Israeli army has in the past rejected such criticism and points to the danger of Palestinian stone-throwers, and also claims that the children are sometimes accused for more serious crimes.



Every year an average of 350 children receive psycho-social support by the YMCA's rehabilitation programme, which combines psychological counselling with vocational support and structured activities to relieve anxiety and stress.