“We started demanding that the night arrests of children be the last resort,” said Jessica Montell, director of HaMoked. The rights group said there had been some improvement two years ago when the Israeli government, in response to a Supreme Court petition by HaMoked, asked that the military call on parents to bring their children for interrogation. But according to figures reported to the Supreme Court, the army summoned Palestinian parents to question their children only a handful of times.
Last year, not a single family received a summons in nearly 300 cases HaMoked tracked in the West Bank. Petty offences and cases where children were released without any charge, as happened to Yousef, were no exception. HaMoked said the numbers are incomplete because it believes scores of similar cases are never reported.