*Palestinian Child Detainee Was Starved to Death, Autopsy Shows*
Palestinian Prisoner’s Society & Commission of Detainees’ Affairs
April 3, 2025
Ramallah, Palestine – The autopsy report for the 17-year-old Palestinian political child detainee Walid Khalid Ahmad, who was killed in Israel’s Megiddo Prison on March 22, 2025, shows that the central cause of his death was starvation, which lead to other severe complications, the Palestinian Commission of Detainees' Affairs and the Palestinian Prisoner’s Society (PPS) have said.
According to the medical autopsy report issued on March 28, 2025, Walid was examined in December 2024 and February 2025 for a severe case of Scabies skin disease which many of the political detainees have contracted since the genocide in Gaza in October 2023. He had also been complaining of severely inadequate amounts of food since at least December 2024. On March 22, 2025, Walid suddenly lost consciousness. It was only then that he was transferred to the prison clinic, but the attempts to revive him failed, and his martyrdom was announced.
The examination showed the presence of air swelling and dense air masses extending to the heart membrane, the neck, the chest and abdominal walls, and the intestines. Additionally, there was severe atrophy due to poor nourishment, a sunken abdomen, and a complete absence of muscle mass and fat under the skin in the upper body and limbs. Furthermore, there were numerous areas of heavy rash caused by Scabies, particularly in the lower limbs and other areas of his body.
The autopsy report showed that the crime of starvation, including dehydration caused by inadequate water intake and fluid loss due to diarrhea from colitis - as well as inflammation in the tissue in the middle of the chest due to air swelling, were all combined causes that led to his martyrdom.
In this context, the Commission and the PPS emphasize that Israeli occupation authorities committed a compound crime against the child detainee Walid Ahmad which began with his arrest and ended with his murder. It is yet another piece of proof of the horrific level of abuse faced by detainees inside Israeli occupation prisons, including hundreds of children, all of whom suffering from a widespread torture and systematic maltreatment, a reality that has only gotten much worse since the genocide in Gaza.
Many testimonies obtained by Palestinian prisoner’s groups, from both adult and child detainees, reflect a severe level of savagery being practiced against them, which primarily aims to kill them, with dozens of Palestinian murdered directly and indirectly since the genocide. These crimes constitute yet another aspect of the ongoing war on Gaza and the entire Palestinian territories.
The Commission and the PPS stress that the rate of Palestinian detainees losing their lives is unprecedented and will only increase with time. Thousands of Palestinians are held behind bars undergoing a myriad of severe violations including torture, starvation, sexual assault, deprivation of medical treatment, unsanitary conditions leading grave and infectious diseases, all of which are leading to an unprecedented rate of killings of Palestinian political detainees. *The international community must act now to save the lives of Palestinian prisoners in Israeli custody.*
The Israeli occupation holds full responsibility for the martyrdom of the child detainee Walid Ahmad. Prisoner groups reiterate their call to the international human rights system to take effective decisions to hold the leaders of the occupation accountable for the war crimes they continue to carry out against the Palestinian people. We demand sanctions against the occupation that would isolate it internationally and restore the core role of the human rights system, which was established for this purpose. They also called for an end to the exceptional immunity that colonial states have granted Israel, treating it as above accountability, punishment, and justice.
