Over 600 Cases of Minors Detained During 2025
The Palestine Center for Prisoner Studies has confirmed that the occupation authorities continued throughout the past year to target Palestinian minors through arrest, abuse, and harsh sentencing. The Center documented over 600 cases of detention during 2025, one of whom died in prison as a result of the starvation policy.
The Center’s Director, researcher Riyad al-Ashqar, explained that the occupation deliberately and systematically targets children with the aim of destroying their lives and futures and affecting their psychological and physical condition, in order to create a weak and fearful generation afraid to resist the occupation in the future. This is carried out through arrests, harsh interrogation, and placing them in inhumane detention conditions, with the objective of “searing their consciousness” that this is the fate of anyone who stands against the occupation.
Al-Ashqar revealed that the occupation authorities have made the arrest of Palestinian children a primary objective and have detained tens of thousands of them since occupying the Palestinian territories. Cases of detention among minors since 1967 have reached 55,000, and during the past year, the occupation arrested more than 600 children.
The occupation authorities escalated their targeting of children following the genocidal war on the Gaza Strip on 7 October 2023, with detention cases among children reaching approximately 1,700. This was accompanied by an unprecedented intensification of abuse and torture measures against them, subjecting them to harsh interrogation and imposing severe sentences, in addition to transferring a large number of them to administrative detention without charge.
Al-Ashqar indicated that the occupation did not hesitate to arrest children as young as 10 years old. It proceeded to arrest wounded children after shooting them, transporting them in military vehicles lacking medical equipment, failing to provide them with primary care, interrogating them in hospitals, or transferring them before completing their recovery to interrogation and detention centers. The purpose is to extract information from them under pressure and torture and to blackmail them given their urgent need for treatment and rest.
Al-Ashqar stated that hundreds of children have been deprived of education and enrollment in schooling as a result of repeated arrests at close intervals, or their detention for extended periods in occupation prisons after the issuance of harsh sentences reaching ten years or more for some child prisoners.
Al-Ashqar noted that torture of detained children begins from the first moment of arrest, through arbitrary arrests from their homes in late night hours and beating them in front of their families, before being transferred to interrogation and detention centers that lack all elements of public health, where the most basic forms of care are unavailable, and where they are subjected to all forms of torture, abuse, deprivation, and starvation.
He highlighted the case of the martyrdom of child prisoner Walid Ahmad (17 years old) from the town of Silwad in Ramallah, as a result of the systematic starvation crime of not receiving sufficient quantities of food during his detention, which was the primary cause of his developing serious symptoms and the deterioration of his health condition, leading to his martyrdom inside the prisons.
Al-Ashqar considered the child prisoners to be victims of Israeli terrorism and of the racist and retaliatory policy pursued by the occupation against them in its prisons, most notably torture and medical neglect. Their conditions witnessed a dangerous and unprecedented turning point after 7 October, with their exposure to harsh methods of torture and the imposition of a starvation policy that led to a significant deterioration of their health conditions.
Al-Ashqar confirmed that the occupation continues to hold 350 minor children in its prisons, subjecting them to severe torment and committing all forms of torture, abuse, and deprivation of the most basic fundamental rights against them. Among them are 155 serving actual sentences ranging from several months to several years, while 90 children are detained without any charge or justification under so-called “administrative detention,” and the remainder are detainees awaiting trial, distributed across Megiddo and Ofer prisons, after Damon Prison was emptied of child prisoners several months ago.
Child prisoners in the occupation’s prisons are subjected to retaliatory measures, most notably being deprived of visits for more than two years, medical neglect, and the intensification of raids and searches of their rooms and sections by repressive special units, which do not hesitate to assault them and spray them with gas, search their rooms and destroy their personal belongings, and deprive them of all basic necessities of life.
Furthermore, the occupation prison administration places no value on the lives of children, detaining them in sections and rooms unfit for human habitation, lacking the most basic means of decent living and the minimum conditions of appropriate health standards. All of this creates conditions for the spread of diseases and epidemics. Dozens of children have been infected with scabies as a result of the unavailability of hygiene supplies, not being allowed to bathe, water shortages, failure to isolate infected individuals, and severe overcrowding inside the cells. The conditions of child prisoners become increasingly difficult and harsh during winter, as their weak bodies cannot endure these harsh and painful conditions, with no heating means or sufficient blankets and winter clothing available.
Al-Ashqar stated that the occupation continues to disregard all human rights principles and values established by international agreements for the protection of the rights of minor prisoners, which call for the prohibition of torture against them and advocate that none of them shall be subjected to torture or cruel and degrading treatment, considering such acts as war crimes. The occupation continues various types of physical and psychological torture against Palestinian children, abusing them during their arrest and during their interrogation in investigation dungeons.
The Palestine Center called upon institutions concerned with children’s issues to assume their responsibilities toward the children of Palestine and what they are subjected to in terms of arbitrary arrests and crimes that have exceeded all limits, and to compel the occupation to implement the conventions and agreements pertaining to children, specifically the Convention on the Rights of the Child, and to put an end to their suffering that worsens daily as a result of the occupation’s aggressive and retaliatory policies.
