French Hill intersection, Monday, 25.7.2005, PM Aya Kaniuk and Tamar Goldschmidt reporting.On Monday this week, we learned again that the police kidnapped or took a boy (the police insist that they don’t arrest children so we are using a different terminology here, ‘probably’ more accurate) who was selling gum at the French Hill intersection. (Much has been written and reported about this child’s family, from the Jerusalem area, and how they are regularly subjected to police and soldiers’ harassment). This was an eight years old boy. A police car simply arrived, stopped, and took him, and since then he went missing. It happened at 11:00 a.m. We learned about what had occurred from his older brother after having arrived at the intersection (six hours after it had happened) and immediately called Ada R. At the same time, we enlisted many others to help; Ran Cohen from the Knesset committee for the advancement of the status of the child, Yitzhak Kadman, head of the national council for the child, Dr. Esti Galili Weisstob, head of the Israeli psychiatric committee for the child, journalists, and spokespeople who all exerted pressure on the police so they would ‘make the effort’ to search for a small Palestinian child who had disappeared. Until this uproar was ignited, the police showed every sign that it did not comprehend why they should get all excited over a Palestinian child that had disappeared. But now they were all up and about. Something among all these enlisted interventions must have helped. At 8:30 pm, the child returned. The outcome however is more complex than the reality. The exploiting father tried to distort what really happened, we assume in order to protect himself. In order to clarify things we prepared with the help of Ada R., the story of the children, that which had happened and happens, and registered an explicit complaint to MAHASH (department responsible for internal investigations of policemen) with copies to various other places. These children are subject to abuse from all those who are supposed to guard over them, as if it were not bad enough that their own parents exploit and abuse them, they are subjected to the abuse of those who should be protecting them from their own parents.