Ramallah - "Jerusalem" dot com - The Commission for Detainees and Ex-Prisoners' Affairs said that the detained children suffer in prisons and detention centers from harsh and inhuman conditions of detention, which lack the minimum standards of life; They suffer from lack of food and its poor quality, lack of hygiene, the spread of insects, overcrowding, medical negligence and lack of health care, lack of clothing, isolation from the outside world and parents, in addition to verbal abuse, beatings, isolation and collective punishments, and deprivation of their right to education.

On the occasion of International Children's Day, the lawyer of the Commission of Detainees and Ex-Prisoners' Affairs, Heba Aghbariyeh, documented a new, painful testimony of the arrest of the child, Muhammad Rushdi al-Natsheh (16 years), from Shuafat camp, northeast of Jerusalem, who is in Damon prison. On September 26, 2022, the occupation forces arrested him and his friend Wael Dino, from the Old City of Jerusalem, after a number of border guards stopped them and dragged them to the Al-Buraq checkpoint, where they threw them on the ground and then tied their hands behind them with plastic ties. For a quarter of an hour, they took them to the police station in Al-Qishla, where they mutilated them, took their fingerprints, and then transferred them to the Moscow Compound for investigation in 4 rooms.

Muhammad describes the circumstances of the interrogation, saying: "Before entering the interrogation room, they put me in a small room and two people entered and beat me severely, then one of them carried a pin and threatened me to insert it into his head if I did not confess, and the other pulled the TV cable and started hitting him on the table to scare me, then he hit me on the leg." After they beat me up, they took me to the interrogation room, and after the interrogation ended, they transferred me to the rooms in the Russian Compound Prison, they kept me there for 22 days, then they transferred me to Megiddo, and finally to the children’s section in Damon.”

The lawyer for the commission adds that the prisoner, while he was in the Moscow Compound, fell ill and suffered from a high fever and pain in the whole body. He did not eat anything for several days, at a time when the prison administration deliberately refused to transfer him to the clinic and show him to the doctor, and they insisted on not giving him even a sedative to reduce the fever and pain he experienced. He was in control of his body.

It is noteworthy that Muhammad has not yet been sentenced, and there is no information about his upcoming trial, but the judge presented several possibilities in the last session, either that he be released to house arrest in Jerusalem and its environs, or that he be transferred to an institution inside, and in the event that the parents do not agree to one of these options, he remains in prison .

The child prisoner, Muhammad, is deprived of visiting his family, as the Israeli occupation authorities refuse to grant his mother a visit permit, as she lives in the town of Anata and holds the West Bank ID, and his father is deceased.