Ahmad Manasra: Key Facts
Palestinian Prisoner’s Society
April 10, 2025


Jerusalemite political prisoner Ahmad Manasra will be released after nine and a half years of incarceration . He was a boy of 13 when he was arrested and detained. Today he is 23.

📌 Key facts:
* Ahmad Manasra was born on January 22, 2002, in occupied Jerusalem. 
* He was arrested on October 12, 2015 at the age of 13 and brutally interrogated and abused by Israeli occupation forces without the presence of his parents or a legal representative in a widely shared video. He was a student of the 8th grade. 
* Ahmad’s case garnered global attention and outcry for many reasons: his arbitrary arrest, torture, and inhumane treatment as a 13 year old under military occupation. During his arrest, he was attacked by a group of settlers and run over with a car, suffering severe fractures to his skull and internal bleeding. Disturbing videos of settlers and soldiers physically and verbally abusing Ahmad as he was lying on the ground, telling him to ‘die’, were also widely shared. His cousin 15-year-old Hasan was executed in the street by occupation forces.
* Despite his severe injuries and the courts acknowledging that Ahmad took no part in any alleged incident, he was still charged with attempted murder and sentenced to 12 years in prison in 2016, later reduced to 9.5 years, and a fine of 180,000 shekels. 
* At the time of Manasra’s arrest, Israeli law (applied to annexed Jerusalem) said children under 14 could not be held criminally responsible. The occupation waited until Manasra was 14 to sentence him, and then officially reduced the age of criminal responsibility to 12 years of age. 
* Manasra has been inhumanely held in complete solitary confinement since the end of 2021 despite his severe mental and physical state, with multiple doctors reports issued, and clear signs of his mental health deteriorating appearing since the end of 2020.
* Ahmad’s story did not begin the moment of his arrest. Like hundreds of children in Jerusalem, he was subjected to the occupation’s daily crimes including abuse and arrest. Palestinian children in occupied Jerusalem face the highest rates of child detention than any other Palestinian city. 
* In 2015, during the onset of a popular uprising, there was a surge in child arrests, especially in occupied Jerusalem. These arrests were accompanied by systematic abuse and torture. Ahmad was one of hundreds of children in occupied Jerusalem who faced this same fate.