In 2009, Israel established the world’s first juvenile military court. The need for such a grim body arose from two features of Israel’s apartheid system: its imposition of military law in the occupied Palestinian territories and its long-standing practice of arresting minors, who can face serious criminal penalties starting from the age of 12. For over a decade, Israel prosecuted around 700 Palestinian children per year through the juvenile military court — but even these pretenses of due process have fallen by the wayside amid the Gaza genocide, as Israel detains hundreds of minors without charges or the hope of a trial.

Similar bursts of arrests followed Israel’s 2008 invasion of Gaza as well as the two intifadas, during which hundreds of children were detained for throwing stones. After the 2014 Gaza War, the crackdown targeted very young Palestinians with particular ferocity. Arrested in 2015 for allegedly standing by as his cousin stabbed two West Bank settlers, 13-year-old Ahmad Manasra was interrogated for hours without seeing his parents or a lawyer. He was too young to receive a prison sentence at the time, so Israel held him until he reached the minimum age and then passed a law lowering that threshold from 14 to 12. Throughout nearly a decade in Israeli prison, Manasra would be thrown in solitary confinement for almost two years. Human rights groups drew international attention to Manasra’s case, but it wasn’t exceptional: Israel subjects an estimated 100 to 200 children to solitary confinement each year, and at some points up to 20% of juvenile Palestinian prisoners have been kept in isolation.

Israel’s latest assault on Gaza has seen it detain 1,700 Palestinian minors, most of whom are teens; 350 of them are still incarcerated, a higher figure than during the first and second Gaza wars. Even more troubling is the fact that Israel is putting young captives in administrative detention at record-breaking rates, mirroring a trend among adult Palestinian prisoners. To place someone in administrative detention indefinitely, the state need not draw up charges or disclose its evidence, much less hold a trial — all it takes is an Israeli military commander asserting that the detainee might threaten public security in the future. Nearly half of Israel’s juvenile prisoners are trapped in this limbo today, compared to 15% in September 2023.