Incarceration conditions and violence against Palestinian children

In 2025, Palestinian children under the age of 18 held in the Israeli detention and incarceration systems continued to suffer from increasingly severe harm. On any given month, an average of about 350 Palestinian children are held in Israeli incarceration facilities, about half of them in administrative detention, without charge or trial, with the youngest administrative detainee being a 14-year-old child.

Israeli military law, which governs the detention and incarceration of Palestinian children who are residents of the West Bank, affords them less protection than Israeli criminal law and international law, yet in practice even this law is often not implemented.

Information and testimonies collected by Parents Against Child Detention from Palestinian children who were arrested and incarcerated, and data published in reports by international child rights organizations, indicate that more than 70% of the children suffered violence at the time of their arrest and/or during their incarceration. The figures are based, in part, on a report released by Save the Children in July 2023, which included interviews with 228 Palestinian children. Later reports and testimonies point to continued, and even worsening, patterns of violence, isolation, and the use of administrative detention against Palestinian children in 2025–2026. Many of the children are interrogated without a parent or lawyer present, and more than a quarter reported that their interrogation was conducted under significant duress, such as being bound and blindfolded during transfer, interrogations at night or after sleep deprivation, threats, shouting and humiliation, pressure to sign documents in Hebrew (a language they do not speak), isolation, or being prohibited from contacting family or counsel.

As noted, in March 2025, 17-year-old Waleed Ahmad died in Megiddo Prison. An autopsy found that at the time of his death he was suffering from starvation, colitis, and scabies.

These figures point to systemic violations of the rights of Palestinian children by the Israeli detention and incarceration system, with a disregard of the protections afforded to them even under the Israeli military law applied in the West Bank, and certainly in contravention of international law and the Convention on the Rights of the Child. The manner in which arrests are carried out and the incarceration conditions have numerous long-term psychological and social consequences.

The scope of reported harm to Palestinian children during detention and incarceration, and the small number of cases in which an investigation is conclusive and results in effective measures being taken, add to the overall picture indicating the ineffectiveness of oversight and accountability systems meant to ensure protection of the rights of Palestinian detainees and inmates in general, and of children in particular.