By Shaiel Ben-Ephraim (on Facebook)
A horrific child abuse scandal, yes another one, rocks Israel. Ariel is a settlement in the occupied West Bank. On Sunday, Israeli prosecutors charged three women from the private “Luchik” daycare there with more than 400 acts of abuse against 17 babies and toddlers, aged six months to three years. You will not be surprised to hear that this occurred in Ariel, a major West Bank settlement:
1) The accused are director, Natalya Kislevsky, 37, and caregivers Darina (Dasha) Khalufa, 37, and Anna Pagelsky, 40. The indictment runs almost 100 pages and describes “punishment methods.”
2) The first was “the choking method.” The caregivers blocked toddlers’ airways with hands, paper or cloth and pinned them to mattresses by the neck. They kept doing it after the children “choked, turned red and fought for breath, to the point of clouded consciousness.”
3) The second was “the binding method.” Children were wrapped tight with their arms pinned and laid face down. Some were force-fed while tied, with their heads tipped back and their jaws forced open. Others were locked alone in a dark room while they cried. The other toddlers watched all of it.
4) Palestinian children get the same methods as procedure. UNICEF found they are blindfolded and tied with plastic ties, and called the ill-treatment “widespread, systematic and institutionalised.” Save the Children found 60% of former child detainees it consulted had been held in solitary. Rights groups said in April that about 350 children were in Israeli prisons, “bound and blindfolded.”
5) Israel even passed a law in 2015 that allows force-feeding of Palestinian hunger strikers. In Ariel, force-feeding a tied-up child is one of the charges.
When the victims are Israeli toddlers, Israel calls binding, force-feeding and dark rooms abuse and files a 100-page indictment. When the victims are Palestinian children, it calls the same things security. Israel is a sick and violent society, and it is now eating itself.
From the Facebook post of Shaiel Ben-Ephraim here via Facts for Working People, here.
[Feature picture: headline in Haaretz]
Editorial postscript: Haaretz, a ‘liberal’ Israeli website and newspaper, allows comments at the end of some articles, including the one featured in the top photograph. The first comment was: “How could people engage in such cruelty against children. They must have thought they were in the IDF deployed to Gaza”.
