By Defense of Children International Palestine, March 24, 2025
Walid Khaled Abdullah Ahmad, 17, has died inside the Megiddo Prison according to news circulated by the Commission of Detainees and Ex-Detainees Affairs on March 23. Yesterday, Walid was walking in the prison yard, became dizzy, collapsed, and hit his head on a railing, according to information collected by Defense for Children International – Palestine.
Other child detainees called toward Israeli prison guards for help, but they did not respond, so the children carried Walid to the yard’s gate where the guards took custody of him. The Palestinian Liaison Office informed Walid’s family of his death but did not provide the cause of death. Walid suffered from scabies and amoebic dysentery, which the same office told his family.
Walid is the first Palestinian child to ever die inside Israeli prisons, according to documentation collected by DCIP. Israeli authorities are withholding his body from his family.
“Walid was taken from his family in the middle of the night, 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. “Walid is the first Palestinian child prisoner in history to die in Israeli custody. It is impossible to understate the urgency with which the international community must finally hold Israeli authorities accountable before more Palestinian children imprisoned in Israel’s dungeons suffer Walid’s fate.”
Walid was detained from his house in the Palestinian town of Silwad, northeast of Ramallah in the occupied West Bank on September 30, 2024, around 3 a.m., according to documentation collected by DCIP. Walid was transferred to the Huwwara integration center before being placed in Megiddo prison, located in northern Israel, where he was kept in poor conditions with limited communication from his lawyer and family. At the time of his death, Walid was in pre-trial detention.
“The lawyer asked Walid, ‘How are you? How is your health?’” recounted Walid’s father, Khaled, in a video interview with DCIP last year, “He asked how the food was and Walid told him it was bad. The judge immediately cut off the call.”
Megiddo prison is one of several prisons located inside Israel where Palestinian children are held. Transferring Palestinian prisoners, whether adults or children, from the Occupied Palestinian Territory into Israel constitutes a war crime according to international law.
Walid is the 18th Palestinian child killed in the occupied West Bank in 2025, according to documentation collected by DCIP.
Neither DCIP nor Walid’s parents can confirm the cause of the child’s death.
The rise in the number of Palestinian children subjected to detention coincides with the alarming conditions faced by Palestinian detainees in Israeli prisons. The situation of Palestinian prisoners has become increasingly worse, with children reporting very harsh conditions of systematic torture and ill-treatment, medical neglect, starvation and spread of diseases, and denial of legal assistance and family visits since October 7, 2023.
Israel’s frequent and systematic practice of child detention violates its international law obligations to arrest and detain children only as a last resort. Article 37 of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child additionally provides that no children deprived of their liberty “shall be subjected to torture or other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.”
Under international law, children are entitled to special protections, which necessitate that they receive the care and aid that they need during times of armed conflict. Palestinian children like Walid are systematically denied that right, as Israeli forces simultaneously continue to indiscriminately detain and fatally target children throughout occupied Palestinian territory. These ongoing assaults on children’s lives are perpetuated by Israel’s entrenched culture of impunity, which continues to claim the lives of Palestinian children nearly every day.
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