A SIXTEEN-YEAR-OLD Palestinian minor has told his lawyer that he was severely beaten while detained by Israeli occupation soldiers last week and that he suffered a broken jaw and teeth, as well as bruises and cuts all over his body.
Mamoun al-Hashem, an attorney with the Commission of Detainees and Ex-Detainees Affairs, said that Mohammad Moqbel, from Arroub refugee camp, near the occupied West Bank city of Hebron, told him when he visited him yesterday at Hadassa Hospital in West Jerusalem that while in detention he was severely beaten by the Israeli soldiers when he was detained last Tuesday at the refugee camp.
Al-Hashem said Moqbel is now in a stable condition at the hospital and that he underwent three hours of surgery on his jaw two days ago.
Moqbel told his lawyer that he was in the camp when clashes broke out between youths and Israeli soldiers, who fired tear gas and stun grenades at them forcing him to run away with the other kids.
Three soldiers followed them and he took refuge in a home before one of the soldiers followed him into the house, caught him and hit him powerfully with his rifle butt on his left jaw.
The soldier then pulled Moqbel out of the house and threw him on the ground. Other soldiers joined in beating and kicking him while he was on the ground. As a result, he was left with several injuries and bruises and was bleeding from the mouth for 10 minutes before he was thrown into an Israeli military vehicle.
Three other minors were also in the jeep, he said, and the soldiers kept putting their feet on them while cursing them.
The kids were then handcuffed and taken to Etzion detention facility in the south of the occupied West Bank where Moqbel was brought before interrogators who assaulted him verbally and accused him of throwing stones at the soldiers.
After the interrogation, he was left in an open area in very cold weather for six hours. At midnight he was put in a cell but, due to the severe pain he was suffering and the screaming, he was taken to Hadassa Hospital the next morning where an x-ray showed that he had a broken jaw and teeth caused by the hard beating he received from the soldiers.
- Palestinian freedom fighter Mohammad Daoud has now served 33 years in Israeli occupation prisons out of a life sentence, said the Palestinian Prisoner Society (PPS) yesterday.
Daoud, 59, from the West Bank city of Qalqilya, was arrested on December 8th, 1987. He is one of 26 prisoners held since before the signing of the Oslo Accords in 1993, the oldest of whom are the cousins Karim Younis and Maher Younis from an Arab town inside Israel.
The Israeli authorities had refused to release the 26 prisoners under a US-brokered deal between Israel and the Palestinian Authority in March 2014.
Daoud lost his parents while he was behind bars, and the Israeli authorities prevented his family from visiting him for alleged security reasons for five years, until his three brothers were eventually allowed to visit him in Gilboa prison, where he is being held.
He suffers from psoriasis, as well as severe dental and stomach problems, and has been dependent on fluid intake for years now.
