Palestinian Children Behind Bars: 
Annual Palestinian Child’s Day Report
April 5, 2025
 
Ramallah, Palestine - At least 350 Palestinian children are currently being held by the Israeli occupation in various central prisons and military camps across the country, including more than 100 of them who are incarcerated without trial or charge in Israel’s unlawful military court system. 
 
On the occasion of the Palestinian Child’s Day marked annually on April 5, Palestinian political prisoners’ legal defense and advocacy groups issue this report highlighting key facts and figures surrounding the children held in difficult conditions behind Israeli bars amid the most violent period yet in the Palestinian people’s struggle against the occupation. 
 
Like the rest of the thousands of political prisoners held by the occupation, Palestinian children face a wide array of abuses and rights violations including torture, starvation, deprivation of medical care and systematic maltreatment. These policies lead to the killing of the first child in the occupation’s custody since the start of the genocide in Gaza in October 2023. The minor, 17-year-old Walid Ahmad from the town of Silwad near Ramallah in the central occupied West Bank, was martyred in Israel’s Megiddo prison on March 22, 2025. 

In parallel with Israel’s significantly increasing mass arrests since the genocide, children have not been spared. No less than 1,200 cases of arrests among children in the occupied West Bank and Jerusalem have been recorded since October 2023. As for Gaza, Israeli authorities have blocked the ability of Palestinian lawyers and prisoner groups from gaining access to information on the number of cases of arrest among children as well as the number who remain in custody with many subject to the severe crime of enforced disappearance. Please find the full report in English attached below

Palestinian Prisoner’s Society (PPS), Commission of Detainees’ Affairs & Addameer Prisoner Support and Human Rights Association