Francesca Albanese said Palestinian minors in Israeli custody are “tormented often beyond the breaking point” and that “generations of Palestinians will carry the scars and trauma from the Israeli mass incarceration system”, Al Jazeera reports.

The comments by the UN special rapporteur for Palestine came in response to Israel’s parliament passing a law on November 7 that authorises the detention of Palestinian children under the age of 14 if they are convicted of murder involving “terrorism or terrorist activities”.

“Up to 700 Palestinian children have been kidnapped each year for decades; held hostages by an unlawful occupation who saw in them a threat in the making,” Albanese wrote on X.

She added that international diplomacy has normalised the situation by “continuing to invoke the ‘resumption of negotiations’ between the ‘parties’ to ‘achieve a durable solution’.”