Mohammed Ibrahim is one of more than 300 Palestinian children being held indefinitely in Israeli custody.
On the morning of October 13, Zaher Ibrahim desperately tried to find his son among the dozens of newly freed Palestinians streaming from Red Cross buses in the occupied West Bank city of Beitunia.
Zaher’s son, Mohammed Ibrahim, a 16-year-old Palestinian American, was swept up by Israeli forces during a dawn raid at their home in the village of al-Mazra’a ash-Sharqiya in February. The Israeli military charged Mohammed with throwing a rock and striking a car driven by an Israeli settler, an accusation he and his family deny.
While Israel has not publicly provided evidence, Mohammed has spent the last eight months in Israeli prisons awaiting a trial that has been repeatedly postponed. Mohammed has been barred from speaking with his family, who have continued to push for his release. And after learning that he suffered a scabies infection and severe weight loss, Mohammed’s family has begun to fear for his life.
The U.S.-brokered ceasefire deal between Hamas and Israel, which freed nearly 2,000 Palestinians from detention, appeared to be the breakthrough Zaher and his wife Mona Ibrahim had so desperately awaited.
On the morning of the release, Zaher rushed to Beituna and carefully watched the buses empty. Mohammed wasn’t a part of the caravan. Zaher then got word that some of those released were being taken to local hospitals for treatment. He hurried from hospital to hospital. Back at home, Mona prepared to celebrate Mohammed’s return by cooking maqluba — a pot of rice, vegetables, and meat served upside down — her son’s favorite dish.
Hours later, Zaher returned home alone.
“I just waited and waited and waited,” Zaher recalled, “and still waiting.”
Mohammed Ibrahim is among an alarming number of children overlooked by the ceasefire agreement. More than 300 Palestinian children remain in Israeli prisons, according to Defense for Children International–Palestine. Nearly half are being held without charges — the highest number since 2008, when DCIP began tracking cases.
The rest of the children are serving sentences or, like Mohammed, are still awaiting trial. The most common charge among children is throwing rocks, which carries a maximum sentence of 20 years. This tally doesn’t include the unknown number of children held inside Israeli military facilities.
While Mohammed’s detention is a single case among many, his story offers a window into Israel’s deadly and unlawful carceral system. Through The Intercept’s interviews with family members and advocates for imprisoned Palestinians, review of medical records, and legal testimony and footage of the Israeli police’s interrogation of Mohammed in February, it became clear that Mohammed’s case fits within the Israeli government’s long-standing patterns of detention, abuse, and deprivation of basic human rights.
Mohammed’s case has received widespread attention over the past week, largely due to his status as an American citizen, but also because of a tireless campaign led by his family. In the U.S., Zaher’s cousin, Zeyad Kadur, has met privately with lawmakers in Congress, alongside parents whose American children were killed by Israeli forces or settlers, calling on the U.S. government to secure Mohammed’s release.
In September, the State Department assigned a diplomat to handle Mohammed’s case. And on Wednesday, after two days lobbying in D.C. — Kadur’s second visit to the Capitol in as many months — 27 Democratic lawmakers sent a letter calling on U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee and Secretary of State Marco Rubio to exert pressure to free Mohammed.
The campaign arrived as details of Mohammed’s prison conditions came to focus this week with the release of a firsthand testimony relayed to a lawyer with DCIP. In the account, Mohammed tells of living in a cell with four bunk beds, shared with at least eight children, forcing some to sleep on the floor. The only items in each cell are thin mattresses, blankets, and a single copy of the Quran, he said.
He and other children are served two meals a day: three small pieces of bread and a spoonful of labneh for breakfast; a small cup of rice and a single sausage with pieces of bread for lunch, he said in the document. Every two to three days, they receive a spoonful of jam and occasionally a small cucumber or tomato. The prison does not serve dinner.
Mohammed also recounted the night of his detention. He said Israeli soldiers burst into his home, blindfolded him, and zip-tied his hands, before hauling him into a military vehicle where he lay flat on its metal surface as soldiers beat him with the butts of their rifles. At the Ofer military base, the beating continued, he recalled.
Mohammed then told of being taken to a police station where a masked interrogator threatened to instruct soldiers to beat him again if he didn’t comply. “Out of sheer fear, I ultimately confessed,” he said in the testimony.
Such details have begun to spark the outrage of many in Washington and across the world. Advocates for imprisoned Palestinians who have been following the case were disturbed by the alleged abuse Mohammed has suffered at the hands of the Israeli military. But perhaps what has troubled advocates most about Mohammed’s case is how familiar it sounds.
“It breaks my heart to say that his case is not exceptional,” said Miranda Cleland, an advocate with DCIP. “His case is so similar to what we’ve heard from so many Palestinian children and families, not just in the last two years, but in the last 30 years — this is exactly how the Israeli military targets Palestinian children and their families.”
Since Israel began its military occupation of the West Bank in 1967, indefinite detentions have been a tool used to control Palestinians. Palestinians are subject to military law and military courts, where prosecutors and judges are Israeli soldiers, and Palestinians lack due process rights.
United Nations experts last July called for the dismantling of Israel’s military court system, saying that it violates humanitarian international law and cannot be improved. They criticized the role of military judges providing “legal and judicial cover for acts of torture, cruel and degrading treatment against Palestinian detainees” by Israeli soldiers and police.
The experts specifically mentioned their concern that such practices extend to children.
The Israeli military declined to comment for this story, referring to the Israeli Prison Service. The IPS and Israeli police did not respond to The Intercept’s request for comment.
The Israeli military court system prosecutes as many as 500 children each year, with a conviction rate of around 99 percent, according to DCIP. The most common charge against Palestinian children in the military court system, like Mohammed’s case, is throwing a rock. Nearly all of the convictions result from a plea deal, which is often the only chance a child has of being released.
Since Hamas attacked Israel on October 7, 2023, delays in trials and hearings have been increasingly common in military court, and plea deals have been harder to come by, with prosecutors pursuing more aggressive sentencing, said Sahar Francis, a Palestinian human rights attorney who has decades of experience representing Palestinians in Israel’s military courts.
Before the outbreak of Israel’s war on Gaza, she said children in similar situations as Mohammed would typically be released on bail and would spend around four to five months in prison. Children are now regularly held for longer periods.
During her 30-year career, Francis came to realize a pattern: Even in cases where children throwing rocks didn’t cause any harm, prosecutors would pursue lengthy sentences. Meanwhile, she noted, cases where Israeli children threw rocks at Palestinians went unpunished.
“There is a huge discrimination policy and it’s intentional — they know they can affect the whole generation,” Francis said. “This is why we are saying it’s a collective punishment because it’s also against the family, in order to intimidate, in order to cause fear within other children, that you could be arrested, you could be punished.”
In 2014 and 2015, the Israeli government enacted a slew of laws to further criminalize stone throwing, including harsher sentences and fines, as well as permission for police to fire live ammunition at individuals throwing stones, including minors, if officers believe the stones pose a danger to anyone.
In its press releases and public statements, the Israeli government regularly labels Palestinians who throw rocks as “terrorists,” even during protests against illegal Israeli settlements that are often guarded by heavily armored military units.
Throwing stones carries both a tactical and symbolic significance to Palestinian resistance, illustrated by the emblematic photo of a Palestinian woman in Beit Sahour throwing stones at Israeli soldiers with one hand while carrying her yellow heels in the other during the First Intifada in the 1980s.
Another image captured during the Second Intifada in 2000 shows a 14-year-old Palestinian boy, Faris Odeh, throwing a stone at an Israeli tank. The following day, an Israeli soldier fatally shot Odeh in the neck as he protested the military, transforming Odeh into an international symbol of Palestinian resistance.
An Israeli military charge sheet, obtained by the family and reviewed by The Intercept, accuses Mohammed of throwing stones toward Israeli vehicles that were traveling on Highway 60 near the Israeli settlement of Kochav Hashachar. One of the stones, the military alleged, struck and damaged the vehicle.
The document stated that the stones endangered the lives of the drivers. The charge sheet cited a military patrol unit that had reported stone-throwing incidents in the area, and mentioned that an Israeli vehicle driven by an Israeli settler was damaged.
Since there have been no court proceedings in Mohammed Ibrahim’s case, it’s unclear whether the Israeli military has evidence to back its charges. He and his family reject Israel’s charges.
The military leveled the charges following an interrogation with masked, armed soldiers and no attorney present, which advocates said is a common practice for detained children.
According to footage of the interrogation obtained by The Intercept, Mohammed sat alone at a table on a swiveling chair with a blindfold lowered to his neck. He spoke to an interrogator who was outside the frame. Video of a separate interrogation with another child implicated in the case shows the interrogators are masked.
In the six-minute video, which The Intercept translated from Arabic, the interrogator prompts Mohammed to “Tell me everything you did, and say it specifically.” At times, the interrogator seems to feed him lines, stating, “Tell me: ‘I went down and I ate, me and my friends, at 8 p.m., we walked, we got into a car.’”
Mohammed responds by saying he and his friends ate and then went for a walk down toward a highway referred to as “Iltifafy.” The highway is known as a road exclusive to Israelis that connects Israeli settlements throughout the occupied West Bank, slicing through and effectively dividing Palestinian towns.
While there, he says, “they started striking.” The interrogator, referring to the distinct license plate colors — yellow or white — that denote Israeli and Palestinian identity, asks if they saw “cars for the Arabs and cars for the Jews.” Mohammed acknowledges he did.
When the interrogator presses further, Mohammed says he and his friends began to throw rocks at “any” cars as “horseplay.” When asked why, he says, “We just did it. We wanted to try.”
“What if your parents were driving by? They’d throw it at them?” the interrogator continues to press. Mohammed says yes and that they were not able to see who was driving the cars.
At one point, Mohammed admits to blindly throwing a rock toward the road “from far away,” but says that the stone didn’t hit anyone or anything. “It just landed on the street.” The interrogator exclaims, “But you threw one!”
“I mean, I threw a rock; wherever it would land, it would land,” Mohammed responds.
The video ends with the interrogator questioning where Mohammed was that morning — “asleep” — and where he was on that Friday – “at work.”
DCIP’s Cleland criticized the forceful nature of the interrogation and the lack of due process rights.
“Mohammed Ibrahim was subjected to a very coercive interrogation,” she said, adding that the practice is common in cases of detained children, “and all interrogations are designed to extract a confession.”
The short video does not corroborate Mohammed’s claim in his testimony that an interrogator ordered soldiers to beat him if he didn’t comply.
For decades, Palestinians in detention have routinely reported poor living conditions, abuse, and even instances of torture. Since October 7, such abuse grew in scale, becoming a more systematic policy of collective punishment, according to human rights advocates, as well as a recent Israeli court ruling acknowledging forced starvation in detention centers.
Due to threats of violence from Israeli authorities, many children have been afraid to speak about their abuse after their release, advocates said. Despite these threats, child prisoners have reported abuse, torture, and sexual assault — claims that echo reports by adult detainees. One teenager from Jenin, released as part of the November 2023 ceasefire agreement, recalled beatings that broke his fingers in both hands.
Treatment against both adults and children from Gaza was especially brutal, Francis, the human rights attorney, said. Children from Gaza spoke of having their hands continually shackled for consecutive months. Others from Gaza told Francis they were beaten and sexually assaulted by Israeli soldiers, who shoved batons up their anuses through their clothes.
“Lots of the prisoners described to me in the visits that they feel they are animals,” Francis said. “They were saying, ‘We believe they treat their pets in their homes better than us.’”
Pinning down exactly how many Palestinian children are in Israeli custody is difficult. The official count — 360 — could be lower, given the release of several children back to Gaza as part of the recent ceasefire agreement (the Israeli Prison Service has also delayed its quarterly release of updated figures). That figure is likely an undercount since an unknown number of Palestinian children, along with adults, are believed to be imprisoned within Israel’s military facilities, such as the notorious Sde Teiman.
Unlike the facilities under the Israeli Prison Service, the military does not share data on Palestinians held inside its military bases. Newly freed Palestinians, including children, are also commonly re-arrested within weeks of their release. Throughout the war, families from Gaza have reported witnessing their relatives detained by Israeli soldiers, only to be told later by Israeli officials that their relatives are not in custody.
Last November, Israel-based human rights organization HaMoked documented 400 such cases of missing Palestinians.
“What is the fate of these hundreds? We don’t know,” said Naji Abbas, an advocate for Palestinian detainees with Physicians for Human Rights Israel, referring to the missing names. “Sadly, we believe most are not alive.”
At least 75 Palestinians have died within Israeli prisons since October 7, 2023, according to a tally of publicly reported cases by the United Nations. In the weeks since the U.N. count, three more Palestinians have died in Israeli custody.
Due to a lack of access to hygiene products and overcrowding, scabies has spread rapidly throughout Israel’s prisons. Abbas and journalists have accused Israeli prison officials of allowing the highly contagious skin disease to spread unabated throughout their facilities as another form of punishment.
The disease, spread by microscopic mites that burrow into skin, causes extreme itchiness and can lead to psychological distress from lack of sleep, as well as injury from scratching.
A court petition filed by PHRI, along with other organizations, in July 2024, led to medical treatment given to some incarcerated Palestinians. But without changes to their living conditions, reinfection is rampant.
When a U.S. embassy official notified Zaher that Mohammed had contracted scabies in July, his family began to fear for his life. The IPS said that he had received treatment for the disease and was placed in medical isolation for 17 days before symptoms had subsided. But memories of recent prisoner deaths fed their concern.
In March, Walid Khaled Abdullah Ahmad, a 17-year-old Palestinian from Brazil, died in Megiddo Prison, the same prison where Mohammed was held at the time. He was the first known child to die within Israel’s prison system since October 7. Walid was arrested in September 2024 in a village neighboring Mohammed’s and was held in administrative detention without charges. While spending time outside of his cell, Walid collapsed in the prison yard, hit his head, and died.
According to an independent autopsy conducted by a doctor and Abbas’s organization, which was granted after PHRI requested a court intervention, Walid showed signs of scabies across his entire body, as well as signs of severe weight loss and malnutrition. The doctor found that Walid, a former athlete and soccer player, had little to no muscle mass left on him, Abbas said.
Medical records noted Walid had been complaining about a lack of food and being hungry for three months leading up to his death.
“Whether you are beating people until death, or denying people who you are holding in custody from medical care, you are killing them,” Abbas said.
Since family visits and phone calls have been prohibited in Israeli detention facilities — another post-October 7 measure — Mohammed’s family hasn’t heard their child’s voice since he was taken in February. Instead, for information about Mohammed’s well-being, the family has relied on attorneys and the U.S. Embassy.
On rare occasions, attorneys and U.S. embassy officials have been allowed to visit Mohammed, who was 15 at the time of his detention and spent his 16th birthday in prison. In the visits, they reported that Mohammed has lost at least 30 pounds. One medical report provided by the IPS to the U.S. Embassy and reviewed by The Intercept noted Mohammed as having a low body mass index.
Every month and a half, Mohammed has a scheduled court date. Each time, prosecutors postpone the hearings. Even so, his family has attended every one, hoping to catch a glimpse of Mohammed through the CCTV cameras fixed onto a holding cell.
During a hearing in August, Mohammed’s older brother, along with the mothers of the three other children detained alongside Mohammed in their village, watched the monitor as their sons shuffled into the holding cell. The mothers didn’t recognize their children — all of them with shaved heads and skinny bodies. They were shocked when they saw Mohammed.
While sitting in the cell, Mohammed noticed the camera and raised his cuffed hands toward the lens to reveal his arms covered in rashes and scabs. His face was gaunt, and dark rings encircled his eyes, family said. Mohammed’s brother returned home, shaken, before sharing his condition with his parents and uncle.
That same month, his parents were able to pass Mohammed a message through the embassy official, assuring him that they were doing everything they could to free him. He responded by asking whether his older sister had passed her final exams needed to graduate from high school. After the official told him yes, he said to tell his father to buy a gold necklace as a gift for his sister and that he would work to pay him back once he got out.
Other messages remain undelivered.
Mohammed’s family has yet to tell him about the killing of his cousin Sayfollah Musallet, 20, who was beaten to death by Israeli settlers on July 11. He had been trying to protect his family’s land from the mob of settlers, his family said. The mob prevented an ambulance from reaching him, and his younger brother eventually carried him to paramedics, but he died before making it to the hospital.
A tight-knit family, Mohammed and Sayfollah were close. Sayfollah had been visiting family in the occupied West Bank, processing the ongoing detention of his cousin. The pair had planned to spend the summer working together at the family’s ice cream shop, Ice Screamin, in Tampa, Florida. Sayfollah had managed the shop after his family bought it one year earlier, introducing a popular Dubai chocolate sundae to the menu.
Zaher wanted the news of his passing to come from a family member or family friend, not through the lips of a third-party official or attorney.
Back in the U.S., Kadur, Zaher’s cousin, is careful how he describes Mohammed’s plight. He is cautious not to frame the push for Mohammed’s release within the context of the Israeli occupation. He’s aware of how polarizing the issue may be while lobbying a U.S. government that has remained a staunch supporter of Israel even as it commits genocide in Gaza. Kadur received a call from a concerned rabbi from Florida who lamented, “It’s just sad that if his name were closer to mine, he probably wouldn’t be there.”
Instead, Kadur has attempted to appeal to officials from a “more human and humanitarian” perspective. “We can’t resolve a 75-year conflict,” he said, “this is just a 15-year-old kid that needs to come home.”
Despite what the family says were private promises from Trump administration officials, they have yet to lead to signs of progress toward Mohammed’s release. It illustrates the limitations of the expected privileges U.S. citizenship affords, particularly if you are Palestinian, and especially if you are on Israeli soil.
Among those who called the family to intervene is longtime diplomat Richard Grenell, a former Bush administration adviser who has been Trump’s envoy for special missions, who was key in securing the release of six American prisoners from Venezuela in January. Since the initial call, however, the family said they have not heard of progress.
After Sayfollah’s killing, U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee visited their family in their village of al-Mazra’a ash-Sharqiya, known as Miami of the West Bank due to its large population of American Palestinians who own land there, often building luxurious homes.
Also at the hourlong meeting was Mohammed’s family, along with the family of Tawfic Abdel Jabbar, a 17-year-old Palestinian American from New Orleans, who was fatally shot by Israeli settlers, military, and police in January 2024. He was the first American killed in the West Bank since the start of the war in Gaza.
The parents of Tawfic and Sayfollah told Huckabee that while their children are dead, the U.S. can still bring Mohammed home, Zaher and Kadur recalled.
“Our family, our village, our city can’t take another American funeral here,” Sayfollah’s father added, according to Kadur.
Huckabee told the group that he would also contact Israeli officials to help free Mohammed, according to Zaher and Kadur.
Israeli authorities have yet to make an arrest or charge any suspects in the killing of Sayfollah or Tawfic. And Zaher said he’s begun to give up hope that the U.S. government would intervene on behalf of Mohammed.
