Is the video of Israeli soldiers detaining a child current?

The video is from 2013.

By taking a screenshot from the video and using reverse image search, we scanned the internet history. The posts and news we came across showed that the incident belonged to 2013.

According to news from 2013, the Israeli army was accused of detaining a 5-year-old Palestinian child in the town of El Halil in the West Bank, alleging that the child threw stones. Israeli human rights group B’Tselem argued that the child should not be detained because the age of criminal responsibility in Israel is 12. The army’s statement, on the other hand, claimed that the child posed a danger to passersby, and the soldiers left him with his family. B’Tselem, on the other hand, stated that the soldiers also took the child’s father and held them both at a military base for 30 minutes, and called for an investigation into the incident, which they deemed “dangerous.”

Child detentions by the Israeli army

The detention of children by the Israeli army has been an ongoing human rights issue for many years. Therefore, it is always covered in the media and human rights organizations.

As mentioned in the evidence section, according to the report provided by B’Tselem, the Israel Prison Service had, by the end of September 2023, detained or imprisoned 146 Palestinian children for “security” reasons, according to their statement. The same report also provided the number of child detentions by year. The table is as follows: blue columns indicate minors aged 16-18, maroon columns indicate minors under the age of 16, and yellow columns indicate minors under administrative detention:

The number of Palestinian children arrested and detained for “security” reasons in July 2013, when the incident in the claim video took place, is 195 in total.

According to the Anadolu Agency, the Palestinian Prisoners Society reported that approximately 900 Palestinian children have been detained since the beginning of the year.

In its study published in July 2023, Save The Children Foundation emphasizes that Palestinian children detained by the Israeli army are exposed to violence and both emotional and physical abuse. 4 out of 5 children (86%) are beaten, 69% are strip-searched, and almost 42% are injured at the time of arrest. Arrests are mostly made between midnight and dawn.

In addition to these data, the raids on houses and arrests by Israeli forces have been reported in the world press for a long time. An AP news article from January 2023, for instance, was about 15-year-old Yousef Mesheh, who was detained in a night raid. Human Rights Watch’s 2015 report also addressed the arrests of children under the age of 15.