Autistic Palestinian child abused in Israeli jail
An autistic 14-year-old Palestinian describes beatings and sexual assault during six weeks in Israeli detention, as a UN report documents systematic abuse of child detainees.
Child detainee describes six weeks of abuse
When Amir was 14 years old, autistic, and from Jaffa, Israeli soldiers came for him. He was taken into custody, imprisoned for six weeks, and later transferred to house arrest before being placed in a residence for young people with special needs. His trial has not yet begun, eight months after his arrest.
What he describes in detention is not an aberration. It is, according to a landmark United Nations report published on May 29, the predictable output of a system that holds children without charge, without adequate care, and without oversight.
“Dozens of beatings by wardens,” Amir told a Haaretz reporter. He described being sexually assaulted by his cellmate, named in the report as Yair Foldes. His real name is under a gag order, and the state controls his identity while naming him as a suspect.
The UN Secretary-General’s annual report on Conflict-Related Sexual Violence (S/2026/321) formally added Israeli entities, including the Israel Prison Service, to its blacklist of parties credibly suspected of committing sexual violence in conflict. This is the first time Israel has been listed. The report documents rape, gang rape, sexual torture, genital abuse, forced nudity, and degrading strip searches of Palestinian detainees, including children from Gaza and the West Bank, between 2023 and 2025. The perpetrators include IDF, the Israel Prison Service’s Keter special forces, and the Police Counter-Terrorism Unit (Yamam).
Amir’s account is not isolated. As of December 31, 2025, 351 Palestinian children are detained in Israeli prisons. Of these, 180, 51 percent, are held in administrative detention without charge or trial. This is the highest number and proportion on record since Defence for Children International-Palestine began monitoring in 2008.
HaMoked, the Israeli human rights organisation, collected 24 affidavits from incarcerated and formerly incarcerated Palestinian children in 2025. They document night arrests, physical violence, prolonged blindfolding and shackling causing injury, and other grave abuses during arrest, interrogation, and detention. Save the Children’s April 2026 policy brief found that “the best interests of the child” are frequently absent from decision-making in Israeli detention of Palestinian children.
Israel denies the findings in the UN report. This denial must be noted, but it is a reflexive response to documented testimony from dozens of children, aggregated by organisations on the ground and now formalised in a UN framework.
The gap between parliamentary concern and political action is stark. The UK government has stated it “continues to call on Israel to immediately facilitate urgent, unhindered access to all child detainees from the West Bank and Gaza to persons providing legal assistance, the International Committee of the Red Cross and appropriate experts.” Yet the same government maintains arms sales to Israel and provides diplomatic cover that sustains the system Amir described.
This is not a story about one autistic child’s mistreatment. It is a story about a system that holds more than 350 children, half without charge, and which a UN report now formally links to patterns of sexual violence, a system the UK parliament acknowledges in debate while continuing to supply the political and economic support that keeps it running.
