t is also possible to discern a similarity with respect to the proportion of the population:
According to the Addamir Prisoner Support Center, a Palestinian organization, since 1967 approximately 650,000 Palestinians have spent time in Israeli prisons, which amounts to about 40 percent of all Palestinian males (including children and the elderly). Above a certain age it is difficult to meet Palestinian males who have not done time in an Israeli prison. There are not many households in the territories in which handicrafts by prisoners are not displayed, as a souvenir of the days in prison, like photos from the days of military service for us.
Between March and October 2002, Israel arrested 15,000 Palestinians. Are all of them terrorists? Anyone who claims that all of the 650,000 Palestinians who have been arrested are criminals is claiming that the Palestinian people is a nation of criminals. Only a politician lacking all restraint, such as Public Security Minister Tzachi Hanegbi, can define all the 7,500 prisoners and detainees currently in prison as "terrorists." Even he knows that some of them are political prisoners.
Those who are spending time in prison without having been tried - the approximately 750 administrative detainees, those who have been convicted of belonging to organizations and those who are tried and sentenced by military courts - cannot be judged by criminal criteria. They should be considered, as the world considers them, political prisoners and even prisoners of conscience......
And they have good cause for concern. The gravest example concerns the children who are in prison.
According to Addamir, 380 of the prisoners today are minors - 78 of them under the age of 16. Israel treats 16-year-olds as adult prisoners even though under the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, to which Israel is a signatory, a person is considered a minor until the age of 18. In practice, even 14-year-olds are not separated - during questioning and detention - from the adults..........
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/467523.html