Isolation as Policy: Solitary Confinement of Palestinian Child Prisoners Rises Sharply

Solitary confinement cases among Palestinian child prisoners rose from 290 in 2024 to 325 in 2025, the Palestine Center for Prisoner Studies reported. The center described the practice as systematic collective punishment and deterrence, not a pattern of isolated incidents.

Riad al-Ashqar, the center’s director, says solitary confinement was rarely imposed on children before the genocidal war on Gaza began in October 2023. Children are now isolated for days, sometimes months. The numbers prove deliberate policy, he says.

Around 350 minors are held in the occupation’s prisons, in the juvenile sections of Ofer and Megiddo and in interrogation and detention centers. Cells are overcrowded. Food is scarce and medical care absent. Prison authorities raid their rooms and have cut off family visits.

Most of the children held in isolation developed anxiety, depression, and hallucinations. Many suffered memory loss. They were beaten, humiliated, and threatened during confinement.

The food they receive is poor, leaving them too weak to fight off illness. Scabies has spread among most of the minors. They have no hygiene supplies and are denied showers and clean water. Medical treatment is withheld. Al-Ashqar says the deprivation is deliberate.

Walid Ahmad, 17, from the town of Silwad, died in Megiddo Prison last March from starvation and medical neglect.

Under international law, these conditions constitute torture and cruel treatment of detained children, al-Ashqar says. They are war crimes.

The occupation’s prison administration shows no regard for children’s lives, he says. It holds children without health care or basic living conditions, in spaces unfit for human beings, and subjects them to collective punishment.

The Palestine Center for Prisoner Studies called on international children’s rights organizations to intervene and compel the occupation to meet its obligations under the Convention on the Rights of the Child.