On 19 August, 16-year-old Yazen Abbasi was brutally beaten by a gang of soldiers after noon prayer outside the mosque in Ras al-Amud, a neighbourhood in Silwan in East Jerusalem.

Over 100 soldiers were present for Friday prayers that day. According to worshippers, the closure of Al Aqsa mosque for Ramadan brings many more worshippers to Ras al-Amud’s mosque.

Yazen, waiting for his family outside the mosque, was startled by the loud bang of a firework set off. Unknown youths threw it in the direction of an assemblage of soldiers, his older brother, Hussein, tells The Palestine Monitor. Yazen was peering over a wall, looking for the source of the firework, when three soldiers attacked him from behind.

"Witnesses told us the soldiers beat him with batons and the butts of their rifles," Hussein notes, "before army commanders arrived and joined in until about ten soldiers were involved."

They dragged him into an army jeep, preventing passersby efforts to free the boy using cans of pepper spray. From there they drove Yazen to an East Jerusalem police station. His father came to the station after being notified of Yazen’s arrest. During questioning by police officers, Yazen denied accusations of stone throwing.

Yazen was then taken to a police station in West Jerusalem where police took his DNA and fingerprints. He was released at 19:00 that evening and taken to hospital where doctors discovered severe damage to his left eye. Along with serious bruises and cuts to the head, he has been left with blurry sight in this eye. Hussein told The Palestine Monitor the damage may be permanent.

Yazen, who suffers from a learning disability that affects his speech, has never had an encounter with police or soldiers before. Eye-witnesses were shocked by the brutality of the attack but Yazen cannot remember all the events. A week later, Yazen still appeared extremely shaken and seemed uncomfortable recounting the narrative, which he can do only partially. His family worries that he will be disturbed by this trauma for a long time and have decided to get him psychological help.

Instances such as these are alarmingly common, with police operating a regime of brutality, directed largely, but not exclusively, at minors of Silwan.

The state desperately wants to Judaise the area, which covers the slope that falls away from the southern edge of Al Aqsa mosque, part of the famed "historic basin" of Jerusalem. Israeli policy here is attempting to establish deeper national ties between Jewish Israelis and Palestinian East Jerusalem to make the division of the city less feasible. The aim is to gradually wrest control of the Palestinian areas encircling the Old City in order to effectively partition the latter from East Jerusalem.

Settlers began to arrive in Silwan in the early nineties and today there are 320 living there.

The promotion of the City of David archaeological site inside Silwan is a clear example of this Judaization objective. The settler group ELAD, which controls the excavation of and access to the site, is using biblical mythology, specifically of the Jewish leader, David, to claim Jewish rights over the area.

The state makes life gruelling for local Palestinians in the hope that they will offer less resistance to efforts at gradual ethnic cleansing; Silwan is thus one of the most deprived areas of East Jerusalem and experiences a disproportionately high rate of home demolitions and evacuation orders.

Conversely, residents have developed a particularly potent political consciousness as a result of this stringent persecution, refusing to be cowed into submission by the illegal machinations of supremacist authorities.

The Wadi Hilweh Information Centre (WHIC), established in the Wadi Hilweh area (next to the City of David) in 2009, acts as a focal point for the dissemination of ideas and information regarding the ongoing settlement activity in Silwan. The Wadi Hilweh local committee and the Committee for Protecting Children help to mobilise residents around the call to challenge police repression.

As soldiers and police, more akin to armed gangs than legitimate security agents, are not accountable to Silwan residents, they do not hesitate to employ indiscriminate violence to keep people in line.

State control in Silwan is growing more Orwellian by the day, with activists persecuted mainly for their political ideas. The crime of throwing stones at well-armed and bulletproof vest-clad soldiers is the pretence under which teenage boys are detained and interrogated.

"Israeli law allows children over the age of 14 to be detained for long periods. Children of 13 and under, sometimes as young as six, are arrested, beaten, and released three to four hours later," explains Jawad Siyam, director of the WHIC. Siyam points out that 15-year-old Louai Rajabi was detained for two months and remains under house arrest.

Children are arrested on a daily basis, Siyam asserts. He worries they are suffering serious trauma as a result, noting how the memory of his own arrest last January is still vivid in his mind.

He suspects that Israel is interested in continuing the clashes between Silwan’s youths and undercover police as a way of displaying its power. "The police punish activists by arresting their children," Siyam maintains, "children becoming the victims of a collective punishment."

Terror appears to be the state’s preferred strategy in its attempt to beat dissent out of children. Masked police frequently break into homes in the middle of the night to drag suspected stone throwers from their families. Other times they are bundled into vans by undercover police in broad daylight and whisked off to a police station only to be pressured into admission of stone throwing.

All this amounts to the terrorising of a population that is relatively defenceless next to the Israeli military behemoth.

Jewish settlers are the benefactors of this abuse: "the police act as a kind of militia for the settlers in Silwan," Siyam told the AIC news source earlier this month.

For Yazen Abbasi, being in the vicinity of soldiers at an inopportune time made him the unwitting target of police reprisal, for which he will suffer for time to come.

The state’s decadent disregard for any semblance of even-handedness in its treatment of minors in Silwan, in particular, has succeeded in robbing many young Palestinians there of the innocence of childhood.