For 35 years, Defense for Children International – Palestine did what no institution with power was willing to do: it witnessed. It deployed field researchers in the occupied West Bank. It collected sworn affidavits, obtained medical records, reviewed CCTV footage, confirmed identities through birth certificates and national identification cards. It produced documentation that met United Nations evidentiary standards. Its findings were not allegations. They were records of what a state does to children when it believes those children do not fully count.
DCIP has now been forced to cease operations as a result of relentless intimidation, vilification, persecution and obstruction by the Israeli government This would not be possible without the silence of the international community.
WHAT IS HAPPENING IS GENOCIDE
It is either rapid genocide through aerial bombardment and starvation or it is slow genocide through violence, forced displacement, incarceration. The International Court of Justice has found it plausible that genocide is being committed against Palestinians in Gaza. It has ruled that Israel’s military occupation of the West bank is illegal, constitutes apartheid and must be brought to an end. The record of what has been done to Palestinian children — the killing, imprisonment, torture, withholding of bodies — is not a matter of dispute. It exists. It has been carefully assembled and documented over decades, by people who have now been designated terrorists for protecting children.
Since October 7, 2023, Israeli forces and settlers have killed 194 Palestinian children in the occupied West Bank., They were shot with live ammunition, killed by drone Apache helicopter strikes, shot in the back and through the windows of their homes. A 14-year-old shot in the head while picking almonds. A 16-year-old shot in the chest while closing up his shop while soldiers blocked anyone from reaching him for ten minutes. Ambulances were prevented from reaching the wounded. The bodies of 56 Palestinian children are being withheld from their families. There is no grief without a grave. This is not a consequence of war. It is a policy.
As of December 31, 2025, 351 Palestinian children are held in Israeli prisons — 180 of them without charge, without trial, in administrative detention renewable indefinitely every six months, the highest proportion ever documented. Ninety-four percent of Palestinian children detained by Israel were interrogated without a family member present. Eighty-nine percent were never told why they were arrested. They have reported beatings, electrical shocks, solitary confinement, denial of medical care, and sexual violence — confirmed by the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights. In March 2025, 17-year-old Walid Khalid Abdullah Ahmad died in Megiddo prison — starved to death, the first Palestinian child ever documented to have died in Israeli detention. An Israeli judge, reviewing his case, acknowledged he had likely been starved. Genocide does not always announce itself with a single event. Sometimes it is a 17-year-old dying slowly in a cell while the legal system looks on without empathy or concern, knowing that no-one will be held to account.
When protection is designated as terrorism, offices raided, accounts frozen and staff sanctioned, the harm is not erased but the record of it is. . Then the harm continues. Unseen. This is the logic of genocide: not only to destroy a people, but to destroy the witnesses to the destruction. In all societies, children represent the future. For Settler Colonialists, bent on replacing the indigenous population, Palestinian children must be deprived of a viable future.
THIS IS RACISM
It is not accidental that Palestinian children are not treated like other children. It is structural. It is the product of a legal and political architecture that has, over decades and with international complicity, placed Palestinian children outside the full protection which childhood deserves.
Israel ratified the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child in 1991. It has claimed, without legal basis, that the Convention does not apply in the occupied Palestinian territory. This position has no standing in international law. It has simply been tolerated — which is not the same thing. The tolerance of a legal fiction that exempts Palestinian children from the protections extended to every other child on earth is a form of racism. It is the institutionalization of a hierarchy of childhood: some children are protected, and others are governed by military order.
In 2024, the Knesset passed legislation enabling courts to sentence Palestinian children as young as 12 to life imprisonment. In March 2026, it passed a death penalty law with no age exemption for children. Over the past two decades, approximately 13,000 Palestinian children have passed through Israel’s military detention system, with a military conviction rate exceeding 95 percent — not because the evidence is overwhelming, but because the system is designed to convict. The age of criminal responsibility, for Palestinian children, is governed by the racist logic of occupation, which requires that these children be permanently manageable by force.
When a society can imprison a 12-year-old without trial, sentence a child to life, and execute — with legal sanction — those it has decided to call enemies regardless of age, it has determined what those children are. They are not, in this framework, children the way other children are children. They are a category. They are a threat to be managed. The racism is not in the hostility. It is in the classification — the removal of Palestinian children from the moral and legal universe in which childhood is recognized as deserving of protection.
SILENCE IS A POSITION
In addressing these atrocities we must consider our own role in the systems that produce them. We are addressing every institution that purports to protect children which has either looked away or reached for the language of ‘balance’, ‘complexity’, or ‘competing narratives’.
There is no balance when the International Court of Justice has made a finding of plausible genocide. There is no complexity in whether a 17-year-old should be starved to death in a cell. There is no ‘both-sidesism’ that can accept the systematic designation of a child protection organization such as DCI-P as a terrorist groups, forcing them to close after thirty five years.
Institutions — professional, governmental, international — that do not respond to what is documented here are not standing outside it. They are standing within it. Silence in the face of apartheid and plausible genocide is not neutrality. It is complicity. It is the endorsement , by omission, of the racial hierarchy that has made this possible.
Psychotherapy and Mental Health Organisations have, at most, issued statements of humanitarian concern, claiming the need to be a-political. This is itself a form of complicity. It is a professional performance of seriousness in the service of inaction.
A CALLTO PEOPLE OF CONSCIENCE TO
CONDEMN the systematic criminalization of Palestinian human rights organizations such as DCI-P. The designation of child protection as terrorism is not a security measure. It is an act of erasure. No state should hold the power to classify the act of witnessing atrocity as a criminal offense. Every professional body, every government, and every international institution that has not condemned these designations has implicitly condoned them.
ENFORCE the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child — without exception and without the double standard that has allowed Palestinian children to be categorically excluded from the protections the world claims to extend to all children everywhere. The enforcement of children’s rights cannot be conditional on the nationality, ethnicity, or political classification of the child.
IMPOSE CONSEQUENCES. The International Court of Justice has found it plausible that genocide is being committed. The International Criminal Court has issued arrest warrants. These findings must carry weight. States that continue to arm, fund, and diplomatically shield Israel in the period after these findings bear direct legal and moral responsibility for what follows. The language of humanitarian concern is no longer adequate. Consequences are required. We call on all states and institutions to heed the call of Palestinian civil society and support their non-violent resistance through Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions.
Every institution that looks away — at the documented evidence, at the children, at their minds and bodies — will be held accountable: in the field, in the profession, and in history.
In solidarity,
Palestine Mental Health Networks
23 Nations · pmhn-international.org
No Healing Without Liberation
