Rights and Accountability 25 March 2025
A released Palestinian prisoner shows signs of ill-treatment upon his release, in the southern area of Khan Younis in the Gaza Strip, on 15 February 2025.
ActiveStillsA Palestinian child died in Israeli custody on Sunday, the first recorded case of a Palestinian child’s death in Israeli detention in history, according to the group Defense for Children International - Palestine.
Walid Khaled Abdullah Ahmad’s family was notified of his death by the Palestinian Authority prisoners’ affairs committee, without details surrounding the circumstances of his death. The committee told the family that Walid had scabies and an intestinal infection.
The 17-year-old, who was held in Megiddo prison located in northern Israel, was “walking in the prison yard, became dizzy, collapsed and hit his head on a railing,” DCIP reported.
Walid Khaled Abdullah Ahmad.
Defense for Children International-PalestineOther child prisoners cried out for help from Israeli prison guards, but none responded. Walid’s fellow prisoners carried him to a gate, where the guards took him.
Israel is withholding the teenager’s body from his family, preventing them from holding a proper burial. This also hinders an independent autopsy that could determine the exact cause of death.
Walid was arrested in the middle of the night on 30 September 2024 from his home in the village of Silwad, northeast of Ramallah in the occupied West Bank.
He was first taken to an interrogation center before he was transferred to Megiddo prison. The children’s rights group noted that the transfer of prisoners from the occupied West Bank and Gaza into Israel is illegal under international law and constitutes a war crime.
Walid was “beaten and abused by Israeli soldiers, and imprisoned in Israel, where he was fed meager portions of rotten food and subjected to overcrowded, unsanitary conditions while at the same time isolated completely from his family,” said Ayed Abu Eqtaish, accountability program director at DCIP.
Torture
Meanwhile, a 34-year-old Palestinian prisoner also died in Israeli custody last month.
Raafat Adnan Abu Fanuna, who was from the Gaza Strip, did not have health issues before he was arrested on 7 October 2023 along with his brother Shadi.
He was injured during his detention, according to the Palestinian Prisoners Club, but his Israeli captors did not allow him visitations or give details surrounding his state.
Abu Fanuna died at the Shamir Medical Center in Tel Aviv but was held at the Ramle prison during his detention.
Several prisoners have died during their interrogation by the Shin Bet, Israel’s domestic spying and torture agency, since 7 October 2023.
This includes the death of Iyad Rantisi, a medical doctor from Gaza who was the director of the women’s hospital in Beit Lahiya in the northern area of the coastal enclave. He died only six days after his arrest.
The Israeli state prosecutor’s office “decided there was no basis for pursuing a criminal case against Shin Bet interrogators” in Rantisi’s case, as well as at least one other, Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported in December.
The UN Commission of Inquiry published a report this month demonstrating how Palestinians are often subjected to sexual violence during their imprisonment.
These acts were “committed with either explicit orders or an implicit encouragement by the top civilian and military leadership,” the report said.
Male detainees were raped and sexually assaulted, including by the “use of an electrical probe to cause burns to the anus, and the insertion of objects, such as fingers, sticks, broomsticks and vegetables, into the anus and rectum,” the report said.
In one case, a Palestinian man held at the notorious Sde Teiman military base turned concentration camp was held in a stress position as a metal tool was inserted in his penis until it started bleeding.
In at least two cases documented in the report, two detainees needed surgery or medical treatment after they were raped by their Israeli captors.
Adnan al-Bursh, the head of the orthopedic department at Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City who was tortured and killed by his Israeli captors, had also been subjected to sexual violence according to the report.
Israeli human rights group B’Tselem published a report last year detailing how since 7 October 2023, Israeli authorities converted “more than a dozen Israeli prison facilities, both military and civilian,” into a “network of camps dedicated to the abuse of inmates.”
While extensive reports highlighted abuse at Sde Teiman, the B’Tselem report reveals that a similar pattern of abuse was widespread in Israeli detention centers across historic Palestine.
Testimonies by former detainees “uncover a systemic, institutional policy focused on the continual abuse and torture of all Palestinian prisoners.”
In December 2023, the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel warned that Israel’s Prison Service was “being transformed from a professional incarceration body to a vindictive and punitive force.”
By then, a number of prisoners had already died after being subjected to beating, torture and cruel abuse, including Palestinians who had been detained well before 7 October 2023.
Acts of abuse include sleep deprivation, medical neglect, starvation, beatings, stress positions, threats of violence against family members and unleashing attack dogs, as human rights groups documented.
20 percent
Walid’s death raises to 63 the number of Palestinians who have died in Israeli detention since 7 October 2023. This includes at least 40 detainees from the Gaza Strip, according to the Palestinian Prisoners Club.
This figure constitutes only the prisoners identified as having died in Israeli custody by the Palestinian Prisoners Club. The group’s director Abdullah al-Zghari said last year that the real number could be dozens higher.
This is “the bloodiest phase in the history of the prisoner movement since 1967,” the group said last month.
There has been a staggering increase in the number of Palestinian prisoners who have died in Israeli custody throughout Israel’s ongoing genocide of Palestinians in Gaza, including through torture, medical neglect and other forms of physical injury.
To put this increase in perspective, 20 percent of all recorded cases of Palestinian prisoners dying in Israeli custody since 1967 have occurred since 7 October 2023.
Since that year, the deaths of 300 Palestinians in Israeli custody have been recorded.
Israel continues to withhold the bodies of 72 Palestinians who have died in its custody, including 61 of those who died since 7 October 2023, among them Walid.
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