Arbitrary Detention and Detention of Children

Israeli military authorities detained Palestinians who advocated nonviolent protest against Israeli settlements and the route of the separation barrier.

Israeli security forces continued to arrest children suspected of criminal offenses, usually stone-throwing, in their homes at night, at gunpoint; question them without a family member or a lawyer present; and coerce them to sign confessions in Hebrew, which they did not understand. The Israeli military detained Palestinian children separately from adults during remand hearings and military court trials, but often detained children with adults immediately after arrest.

As of September 30, Israel held 135 Palestinian administrative detainees without charge or trial, based on secret evidence. Israeli prison authorities shackled hospitalized Palestinians to their hospital beds after they went on long-term hunger strikes to protest their administrative detention.

Alestinian Authority

Complaints of torture and ill-treatment by West Bank PA security services persisted. The ICHR reported 126 complaints as of October 31.

PA security services and men in civilian clothes identified as security employees violently dispersed peaceful protests and arbitrarily detained protesters and journalists. The PA continued to ban the distribution of two pro-Hamas weekly newspapers in the West Bank.

Palestinian courts did not find any West Bank security officers responsible for torture, arbitrary detention, or prior cases of unlawful deaths in custody. To our knowledge, the PA did not prosecute officers for beating demonstrators in Ramallah on August 28.

Attacks by Palestinian civilians injured 60 settlers in the West Bank as of September 30, the UN reported. On April 30, a Palestinian civilian killed Eviatar Borovsky, a security guard from Yitzhar settlement. In July, an Israeli military court convicted a Palestinian man for the attack.

Palestinian governing authorities in the West Bank, as well as in Gaza, delegated jurisdiction over personal status matters such as marriage and divorce to religious courts. In practice, women seeking marriage and divorce suffered discrimination. Courts required Muslim women to obtain a male relative’s consent to marry and to obtain the husband’s consent to divorce except in limited cases.

Israel

Bedouin citizens of Israel who live in “unrecognized” villages suffered discriminatory home demolitions on the basis that their homes were built illegally. Israeli authorities refused to prepare plans for the communities or approve construction permits, and rejected plans submitted by the communities themselves, but retroactively legalized Jewish-owned private farms and planned new Jewish communities in the same areas.

In September, according to the Israeli rights group Adalah, the Interior Ministry stated that it had demolished 212 Bedouin homes in 2013 and that Bedouin themselves, under threat of heavy fines, demolished an additional 187 homes. In June, the Israeli parliament gave initial approval to a proposed law that would bar Bedouin from contesting home demolition orders in court or appealing zoning plans that discriminate against Bedouin communities, raising the likelihood of increased numbers of home demolitions. Government officials estimated that the law, if implemented, would displace 30,000 Bedouin.

There are an estimated 200,000 migrant workers in Israel. In March, the Supreme Court ruled that Israel’s Work Hours and Rest Law, which provides for overtime pay, does not apply to migrant workers, mostly from the Philippines, who work as live-in caregivers for ill or elderly Israelis. Many caregivers are indebted to recruiting agencies, beholden to a single employer for their livelihood, and unable to change jobs without their employer's consent. A 2012 bilateral agreement with Thailand significantly reduced recruitment fees for Thai agricultural workers and made it easier for them to change employers.

Government policies restrict migrant workers from forming families by deporting migrants who marry other migrants while in Israel, or who have children there.

Around 60,000 African migrants and asylum seekers have entered Israel irregularly from Egypt since 2005; Israel’s almost-completed fence along its border with Egypt reduced new arrivals in 2013 to a few dozen. Israel continued to deny asylum seekers who entered the country irregularly the right to a fair asylum process and detained around 2,000 people, primarily Eritrean and Sudanese nationals. In June, the Ministry of Interior began to implement a “voluntary returns procedure” under which asylum seekers could “choose” to be deported, waiving their right to an asylum procedure, rather than remain in indefinite detention under the “anti-infiltration law.” Earlier, in May, Israel stated it had “voluntarily” deported around 500 Sudanese from detention and another 1,500 who had not been detained, and it later deported smaller groups of Eritreans through an undisclosed third country. The Supreme Court overturned the anti-infiltration law in September for violating the right to liberty under Israel’s Basic Law, and gave the government 90 days to review the cases of detainees.

Israel continued to delegate jurisdiction over marriage, divorce, and some other aspects of personal status to Jewish, Muslim, Christian, and Druze religious courts. In practice, women seeking divorces suffered discrimination, such as refusal of divorce by state-funded Jewish religious courts without the husband’s consent in up to 3,400 cases per year, according to women’s rights groups. The government did not publish figures of spouses denied divorce but women were reportedly the vast majority.