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Defense for Children International-Palestine (DCI-P) has ended its extraordinary work with the children of Palestine as a result of unending threats from the State of Israel. Despite having been designated by Israel as a terrorist organization in 2023, DCI-P had continued its groundbreaking work of investigating, documenting and exposing human rights violations against Palestinian children as well as providing legal services to children and holding both Israeli and Palestinian authorities accountable to principles of human rights as described in international law.
But in an announcement earlier this week, DCI-P’s General Director Khaled Quzmar said, “After 35 years of defending Palestinian children’s rights, we are not able to overcome operational challenges resulting from Israel’s targeted criminalization of Palestinian human rights organizations.”
The closure comes after DCI-P reported just last month that of the 351 Palestinian children detained in Israeli prisons at the end of 2025 — 51 percent of the total — are held in administrative detention without charge or trial, the highest number and proportion on record since the NGO began monitoring the numbers.
Defense for Children International-Palestine — the only Palestinian NGO focused specifically on the rights and needs of children — served as an independent “national section” of Defence for Children International, a child-rights movement and non-governmental organization with over 35 sections around the world and an international secretariat in Geneva.
In an interview with Mondoweiss, Quzmar described how the work of DCI-P began in 1991 by providing legal services to children in the Israeli military court system. “But we further developed our mission when we noticed that nothing had changed as a result of our work. To the contrary, the number of children in detention increased and the violations against children increased.”
“So we went beyond providing legal services and psychosocial support to the children and their families,” he said. “We started to document the violations in order to confront the military system by providing evidence of torture… and the lack of humanitarian standards according to international law… We started to raise the issue of accountability.”
DCI-P’s international calls to accountability led, in turn, to Israel’s raiding the DCI-P offices and designating it a terrorist organization. Soon after, Josh Paul — the State Department staff member who two months earlier had publicly resigned his post in protest of the Biden administration’s decision to continue to provide lethal arms to Israel during Israel’s war on Gaza — described what led to the raid.
In a December 2023 Christiane Amanpour interview, Paul said, “I was part of the human rights vetting process for arms going to Israel, and a charity called Defense of Children International-Palestine, drew our attention at the State Department to the sexual assaults, actually the rape of a 13-year-old boy that occurred in an Israeli prison, in Jerusalem. We examined these allegations. We believed they were credible. We put them to Israel, to the government of Israel. And you know what happened the next day? The IDF [Israeli Defense Forces] went into the DCI-P offices and removed all their computers and declared them a terrorist entity.”
“Still,” Quzmar told Mondoweiss, “after the designation, we decided not to leave the children alone, to continue to work with the children. We changed our tactics in order to protect them.” Instead of bringing children and their families to the DCI-P office — which was closed by the Israeli military — staff began to work inside schools and through local community councils which valued their work.
But “Israel’s unrelenting pressure,” Quzmar said, “their using tools of defamation, propaganda, prosecution and physical threats” led him and the DCI-P board to cease operations.
Quzmar continued, “The designation of my organization is not an isolated action… systematic steps were taken against our organization.”
Founder and former General Director of DCI-P, Rifat Kassis, echoed this theme when contacted by Mondoweiss. Kassis told Mondoweiss, “The forced closure of Defense for Children International-Palestine — following its and other Palestinian civil society organizations’ designation by Israel and the United State as ‘terrorist entities’ — marks a critical escalation in the systematic shrinking of civic space.”
“These designations did not emerge in isolation,” Kassis said, “Rather, they were preceded by years of political pressure and restrictive measures that increasingly constrained Palestinian and even Israeli human rights organizations. Many European donors, whether out of caution or political expediency, adopted compliance frameworks and funding conditions that effectively mirrored Israeli narratives, contributing to the delegitimization of these organizations. In doing so, they unintentionally, or in some cases knowingly, laid the groundwork for more severe actions, normalizing the language and logic that would later justify outright criminalization and closure.”
“At the same time,” Kassis said, “Israel intensified its efforts to silence human rights defenders precisely because of their growing impact on international accountability mechanisms, including the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court. Organizations like DCI-Palestine played a crucial role in documenting violations and submitting evidence that could inform international legal proceedings.”
“The convergence of Israeli and U.S. positions in labeling these groups as terrorist entities reflects a broader strategy aimed at dismantling the infrastructure of accountability. By targeting those who produce credible, field-based evidence, these measures seek to silence dissent and to obstruct pathways toward justice, effectively granting impunity while undermining international law itself,” Kassis explained.
Jennifer Bing, now National Director of the U.S. Palestine Activism Program — a program of the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) — was co-coordinator of No Way to Treat a Child, a joint advocacy program of DCI-P and AFSC. Commenting to Mondoweiss on the closing of DCI-P, Bing said, “Because DCI-P was so meticulous in its field work and the professional approach that it took documenting the experiences of the children, it gave us a strong footing to talk to members of Congress and a wider community of advocates for Palestine.”
No Way to Treat a Child brought Israel’s illegal occupation and its treatment of Palestinian children to the attention — and the hearts — of tens of thousands of Americans and led to Minnesota’s Representative Betty McCollum introducing bills in 2017, 2019 and 2021 to prohibit Israel from spending U.S. taxpayer dollars on, among other things, the military detention, abuse and ill-treatment of Palestinian children.
In Bing’s conversation with Mondoweiss, she lamented the closing of DCI-P. “Honestly, what makes me sad today is that as bad as it was when we launched No Way to Treat a Child, it is exponentially worse now… the excessive abuses and detention are so much worse than they used to be. And of course, we’ve seen that a genocide has happened since then.”
“It’s incredible,” Bing continued, “that not more members of Congress are outraged and demanding accountability for U.S. aid to Israel. 17,000 children at a minimum have been killed in Gaza. It’s astonishing. It’s unspeakable that more efforts are not being made to stop the killing… The work that DCI-P did through counselors and networks was a work often unseen. We hope other institutions and new institutions in Palestine will take up the work to provide legal assistance to the Palestinian children in prison as well as to document their experiences and to help the children who come out of prison.”
In an email later received from Quzmar, he writes, “DCI-P was founded to ensure that no Palestinian child stood alone before an Israeli military judge. It is those children — innocents in a malevolent system of injustice — who are on my mind the most right now. I also hold in my heart the immensely brave advocates and lawyers of DCI-P who have fought for so many years for the rights of children. There are many dark things happening these days, and many children across the Middle East who are suffering…. The loss of DCI-P is the loss of a critical voice for those children. And in a world where might outweighs right, it is a further and heartbreaking loss for all humanity.”
Quzmar repeated the plea he had made in the earlier announcement: “Now, we look to others to take up the charge and fight for the future that Palestinian children deserve.”
“That duty,” he wrote, “continues for each and every one of us.”
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