Karakashian told Al Jazeera: "The goal [of the detentions] is to terrify the population so that they will submit and not resist the occupation."
DCIP said it was alarmed not only by the rapid rise in the number of arrests since last October, but by the growing number of young children being locked up. More than 100 of those currently in prison are aged between 12 and 15.
This month, a military court sentenced a 13-year-old girl from Beit Fajjar, near Hebron, to four and a half months detention after she allegedly approached a military checkpoint holding a knife.
Following strenuous criticism, Israeli authorities released the youngest prisoner in an Israeli jail, 12-year-old D. al-Wawi, on Sunday, two months before her four and a half month sentence finished.
The dramatic increase in arrests has coincided with a surge of attacks and protests by Palestinians in the occupied territories since last October. Most Palestinian children in detention are convicted of throwing stones.
In addition to a jail sentence, each is given a suspended sentence, usually of several years, that is activated if they are rearrested. About 90 percent also receive a fine.
Karakashian said that in recent months military courts had been increasing all three components of the children's sentences. "Many families cannot afford to pay the fine, so the children have to serve a longer sentence in lieu," he told Al Jazeera.
"And the suspended sentence is like a sword hanging over their heads. Many are afraid to leave the house or go to school for fear that they will be arrested at a checkpoint and sent back to detention."
"They can end up under a self-imposed house arrest for years after their release."
Narrow escapeThe new report is likely to embarrass Israel after it only narrowly avoided inclusion last year in a United Nations "shame list" of serious violators of children's rights. UN agencies had been especially disturbed by the 500 children killed and thousands wounded in Israel's 2014 attack on Gaza, Operation Protective Edge.
This year's report is due to be issued in the coming weeks by the office of the UN Secretary-General, Ban Ki-moon. Israel ratified the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child in 1991. But a 2013 report by UNICEF, the UN children's agency, concluded that abuses of Palestinian minors in military detention were "widespread, systematic and institutionalised."
A year earlier, Israel was harshly criticised in a report by a British government-backed delegation of lawyers.
Catherine Weibel, a spokeswoman for UNICEF in Jerusalem, told Al Jazeera the agency was in a "continuing dialogue" with the Israeli army in an effort to improve the military detention procedure for children.
Israel is the only country in the world, according to DCIP, that "systematically prosecutes between 500 and 700 children in military courts each year."
The Israeli army had been unnerved by the mounting bad publicity, said Gerard Horton, of Military Court Watch, which monitors abuses of children in detention.
An army debriefing paper, released in 2014 under a Freedom of Information request, noted that evidence of abuses to children "may inflict real harm on the legitimacy of Israel and its actions in the area."
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