Child Rights under Fragmented Legal Authority A Comparative Analysis of Israeli Juvenile Law, West Bank Military Justice and Gaza Security Detention

The protection of children under Israeli authority raises an urgent but neglected issue in international child-rights law: the legal category ‘child’ with regard to nationality, territory, and security classification is applied unevenly. Prior studies have covered Israeli juvenile justice, Palestinian minors in administrative detention in the West Bank and the humanitarian situation in Gaza, while others have briefly acknowledged this complex issue, but few have comparatively examined the legal spaces of all three within a human rights framework. This paper investigates that absence, demonstrating how Israeli civilian law, West Bank military law and Gaza-related security policy each contribute to different and non-integrated systems of child protection. The study adopts a normative legal methodology by analyzing the Youth (Adjudication, Punishment and Methods of Treatment) Law 1971, Military Order 1651, The Unlawful Combatants Law and looking at the Convention on the Rights of the Child, The Fourth Geneva Convention, as well as some humanitarian and human rights reports. The work notes that Israeli minors in Israel are mostly situated within a rehabilitative, welfare-oriented juvenile justice framework centered on rehabilitation, parental involvement, judicial oversight and detention as the last resort. In contrast, in the West Bank, Palestinian children are caught up in a military justice system based on security and deterrence principles, while inside Gaza they experience an overarching regime of vulnerability that is associated with hostilities between Israel and armed groups in Gaza; blockade; forced displacement; humanitarian deprivation; and security detention. They assert that such situations of legal responsibility create a divided logic of childhood, with one category recognised as rights-possessing subjects and another constructed from the perspective of governance through security. It finds that such fragmentation raises significant concerns with respect to the principles of equality, non-discrimination, proportionality and the best interests of the child as well as the special protection owed to children under international human rights law; international humanitarian law (IHL) and linked issues.