Ahmed Manasrah was 13 when he was convicted by the Israeli High Court of attempted murder. He was, in fact, with his 16 year old cousin Hassan who killed an Israeli teenager and stabbed another man in the illegal settlement of Pisgat Ze’ev in occupied East Jerusalem on that tragic day in 2015. Hassan was fatally shot by a member of that illegal settlement.

Ahmed was run over by a car, beaten by settlers, and filmed while he lay bleeding in the street, taunted by onlookers. He was arrested and convicted even though he never stabbed anyone and even as the High Court admitted Ahmed had nothing to do with the incident.

Ahmed was sent to prison for 9 and half years. Human rights organizations documented torture and depravation of the boy while he was in custody. He was harshly interrogated without the presence of his lawyer or his parents. And while in prison, he was put in solitary confinement for a majority of the time. This led to him developing schizophrenia. He attempted suicide several times.

In a related case, a teenager from the occupied West Bank recently died in an Israeli prison after being held for six months without charge. In fact, scores of other Palestinians detained without charge have come out shaking, gaunt, injured, with signs of torture and needing prompt medical attention. One had a star of David carved into his back.

And there have been many documented incidents of rape and sexual torture. One resulted in the death of the highly respected surgeon and head of orthopaedics at Gaza’s al-Shifa Hospital, Dr. Adnan Al-Bursh. According to the Israeli human rights organization HaMoked, prison guards dragged Al-Bursh and dumped him in the prison yard, naked from the waist down, bleeding and unable to stand. He died in agony a short time after.

This past August, the Israeli media outlet Channel 12 released a video showing soldiers at a notorious prison in the Negev desert gang-raping a Palestinian detainee. There have been instances of soldiers using dogs as well. “They don’t care if you’re from Gaza or Jerusalem, whether you’re a doctor or a labourer – if you’re a Palestinian, you’re the enemy, ” Shai Parness of the Israeli human rights organisation B’Tselem said. “It’s brutal and it’s systematic.” B’Tselem’s August report, Welcome To Hell, called these prisons “a network of torture camps.”

There were protests in Israel, but not to object to these rapes. They were in defense of the perpetrators. All of this has gone on with little to no denunciation, let alone acknowledgement, from Western politicians and most media.

For Ahmed, his horrendous treatment underscores the widespread devaluing of Palestinian children by the Israeli occupation. As tens of thousands of children have been slaughtered, sniped and starved in Gaza over the past year and a half, this case provides a window into an apartheid system that has been meticulously designed and constructed to crush an entire people over many years. A dehumanization where even children aren’t spared the full boot of the state. And the result of all of this has laid out a bloody path to genocide.

According to the Jerusalem Prisoners’ Families Committee: “The Israeli occupation deliberately released Ahmad away from the prison, while his family waited at the prison gates to welcome him upon his release. A Bedouin man from the Negev (Naqab) received Ahmad and called his family to inform them that their son had been freed.“

Kenn Orphan, April 2025