Israel remains the one country where children are routinely prosecuted in military courts – between 500 and 700 each year. Ill treatment is widespread and the cars this leaves on young lives can last a lifetime.
Palestinian children as young as 12 are routinely:
- Taken from their homes at gunpoint in night-time raids by soldiers.
- Blindfolded, bound and shackled.
- Interrogated without a lawyer or relative being present and with no audio-visual recording.
- Put into solitary confinement.
- Forced to sign confessions (often in Hebrew – a language they do not understand).
Stories from a few of the child prisoners held hostage by Israel
Ahmad Manasra
Ahmed was arrested at age 13 and imprisoned at 14 for allegedly taking part in a stabbing attack. He was charged with attempted murder even though the courts admitted that he did not attack anyone. He spent 9 and a half years in jail.
Ahmad was with his cousin at the time of his arrest. His cousin was shot dead and Ahmad was severely beaten and run over by an Israeli driver, suffering fractures to his skull and internal bleeding. A video of him lying on the ground, his head bleeding, while being taunted by Israelis, went viral, and his case became an international scandal.
After spending long periods in solitary confinement, he suffered from paranoia and was, at times, close to suicide. Many Palestinian and international groups campaigned for his release including the EU and UN.
At the age of 23, he was eventually released, but at a long distance from the prison, leaving him alone in an area he didn’t know. A passer-by found him in the Beersheba area in the southern Naqab and contacted his family.
An Amnesty spokesperson said, “Nothing can undo the years of injustice, abuse, trauma and ill-treatment he endured behind bars” and his face tells the story of his suffering.
Saifan-Allah
This 16 year olddisappeared in Gaza on June 7, 2025. The family searched everywhere but could not find him. Saifan suffers from epilepsy and requires regular medication, increasing his family’s worries. The next evening, Saifan’s father received a call from a member of the Israeli intelligence, who said that Saifan had been detained for allegedly entering “a restricted area”. The father pleaded with the man, explaining Saifan’s medical and mental health conditions, but the caller ended the conversation, saying only that “the army will take care of it.” Since then, the family has received no updates about his condition or whereabouts.
Musab and Khaled
Defence of the Child International Palestine – (DCIP) – does amazing work, recording what is happening to children in Palestine so that the world knows how Israel seeks to undermine Palestinian society by attacking its most vulnerable people – children. This process is designed to wreck family life, which is the fabric of Palestinian society and break the spirit and resistance of the next generation of Palestinians who might resist Israel.
DCIP is now recording the “disappeared” children of Palestine, youngsters who went out and just vanished without trace, presumably into the hands of Israeli soldiers – like Musab and Khaled.
Musab Hussein Alyan was just 12 when he went missingin August 2025 from Gaza City. His mother thinks he followed others who gathered around aid trucks to collect left over food and other things they could find. Some witnesses saw a group doing just that, but the Israeli army encircled them and took them into custody. She thinks Musab must have been one of those taken. Khaled Saleh and his brother went out searching for firewood. They too disappeared. Khaled is just 13. Like Musab’s parents, Khaled’s family have searched all the hospitals and asked everyone they know to try to find out what happened to their sons. They even searched for human remains but these boys – and others like them – are now the “disappeared” children of Gaza
Hanaa Haitham Hammad
Hanna isschoolgirl from Al Arroub Refugee Camp near Hebron. Her home was raided in June 2025. Hanaa was taken into prison and held without charge or trial under the Israeli system of Administrative Detention. A month ago, her imprisonment was extended for the third time – again with no charge or trial. Hanaa was denied the right to take her final school exams, missing out on this important landmark. But this is just the tip of the iceberg of deprivation and suffering of a young woman who doesn’t know when – or if – she will be released.
Rose Khweis and Aseel Shehada
Israel has a long history of imprisoning young people, teenagers, like Rose and Aseel. Even before this phase of the genocide, Israel was taking between 500 and 700 children into prison every year.
They were often seized in night raids on their homes, subjected to treatment which amounts to torture and denied access to parents and lawyers. This has got even worse since 2023. Rose and Aseel are teenage girls who managed to get released as part of a prisoner swap in January last year when 90 women and children were set free. We know that after these big releases, Israel re-arrests large numbers of people and puts them back in jail.
Rose was just 16 years when she was accused of trying to attack an Israeli soldier near Al Aqsa. Rose was sentenced to 10 years in prison and while in jail suffered many health problems and had to be put in hospital. Once she was set free, Rose said jailers treated people “like animals.” Aseel was arrested in 2023 when trying to cross Qalandia checkpoint. Soldiers shot her in the leg 11 times, she needed many operations for her injuries. Now she has been released, Aseel is picking up her studies and is at University but carrying with her all the physical and psychological damage done in prison.
Faris Abu Jabal and Mohammed Al- Zoghbi
Both these boys were abducted while seeking food, transported outside Gaza to the Sde Teiman military detention camp and subsequently tortured and starved.
This prison camp is notorious for its torture, but B’tselem, Israel’s own Human Rights organisation, says Sde Teiman is just the tip of the iceberg; Israel’s prisons are a network of “torture camps”. They tell us that torture is systemic now across all Israel’s prisoners. Ironically, Israel is a still a “State Party” to the “Convention against Torture”, but its troops carry out torture with impunity, as these testimonies show.
Faris was 16 when he was abducted from Gaza. He was beaten, thrown into a hole, stripped naked and then dressed in white coveralls, kicked and abused by soldiers. Faris was placed in a cell for children, interrogated, bound to a chair and beaten. The jailer boasted that the soldiers had raped his mother and sisters – other child prisoners said all the boys were taunted like that to break their spirits. Mohammad was 17, when he was also taken to Sde Teiman. He tells us that in the night, stun grenades were thrown into his cell, and the prisoners were told to kneel before being beaten. Both Faris and Mohammed were subjected to the “Disco Room”, with its unbearably loud music before being interrogated. Mohammed’s hands were bound so tightly his arm was broken, he suffered electric shocks and attacks by dogs.
Faris and Mohammed face a lifetime with scars, both physical and mental, from the treatment they received
