I was listening to Fox just now, and they ran a report on summer camp for Palestinian children, at which instead of making lanyards and leather products, learning to swim or sail, and engaging in various sports, they are learning to sneak past Israeli checkpoints, and the virtues of dying for the Palestinian cause. You know, the kind of child abuse that Charles Johnson documents on a regular basis.

And then I recalled that people like Human Rights Watch have actually expressed concern about the use of children as soldiers. Surely, thought I, they will have had something to say about this?

I wandered over to see, and sure enough, it’s a major area of concern. So I clicked on the link on the right of the page, for specific area reports, confident that I’d find the abuse described above reported in detail, with appropriate opprobrium.

But (and I know you’ll be amazed to hear this), there was no obvious mention of it among the reports as listed. Oh, wait, down toward the bottom, there’s a discussion of Lebanon, which at least is in the neighborhood. We discover there that some civilians have been expelled from Lebanon for refusing to join a militia.

Well, that sounds promising. Of course, am I cynical to suspect that the only reason this gets a mention is because, according to the little blurb, it is “an Israeli auxiliary militia”?

But of course.

But I wanted to be fair, so I decided to dig down another level, to the latest (2003) overall HRW report on the subject.

This showed a little more promise–it has a section called “ISRAEL AND THE OCCUPIED PALESTINIAN TERRITORIES.”

Surely, I thought, now we’ll find out about all of this turning young Arab children into Jew-hating killbots.

Imagine my surprise again, to learn that they discuss:

• Israel holding teenagers in the same prisons with adult men.
• Israel using youth as informers against Hamas and Islamic Jihad
• Israel allowing seventeen-year-olds to volunteer for the IDF
• Arrest and interrogation of children suspected of throwing rocks, by (you guessed it) Israel

Now, arguably some of these, if true, can certainly be said to be human rights violations, but I’m straining my brain to determine how they constitute forcing children to be soldiers, which I thought was the point of this particular report. And as to the Palestinian summer camps that Charles and others point out?

There was no evidence that the Palestinian Authority (PA) recruited or used child soldiers. In May 2002, the PA addressed the United Nations Special Session on Children and advocated the application of the CRC-OP-CAC, which prohibits the use in hostilities of those under the age of eighteen.129 In 2002, the PA also reaffirmed its commitment to the Coalition not to use children in hostilities in a private communication…

…During 2002, both Hamas and Islamic Jihad disavowed the use of children after under-18s were involved in suicide bombings and armed attacks on Israeli settlements in the Gaza Strip. A Hamas statement in April 2002 called on mosque imams