Israeli army tortures a Palestinian toddler in Gaza in front of his father, family says

The marks on the child’s legs appear unmistakable. Round burn marks, as if from cigarette butts, as well as puncture wounds. His pants have the same two holes, and they are stained with blood. This was the state in which 18-month-old Jawad Abu Nasser was returned to his family in Gaza by the Israeli army.

In video testimony for Mondoweiss, Waad al-Shafi, 19, from the Maghazi area in central Gaza, holds her son and lifts his legs and feet toward the camera. According to the family, the toddler was subjected to severe torture by the Israeli army. They say that the Israelis had put out cigarettes on his legs and punctured them with sharp objects.

“Here is where his foot was pierced, and here is where cigarettes were put out on him,” Jawad’s mother says, holding his feet as she points to each injury. “And here’s another wound. And another.”

The family says they suspect that Jawad’s torture could have been an attempt to pressure his father into providing information, and they also believe that he was likely there while the soldiers carried out the abuse of his son.

‘Both of them were being tortured together’

Waad al-Shafi says Osama Abu Nassar, her husband and Jawad’s father, left home carrying their son to buy him sweets from a nearby shop. Instead, he mistakenly headed east toward the “Yellow Line,” the invisible border cutting the Gaza Strip roughly in half as part of the ceasefire between Israel and Hamas. The family lost contact with him at around 10 a.m. and heard nothing until 8 p.m. that same day, March 19.

She adds that her husband had been experiencing severe psychological distress in recent weeks and was not in stable condition.

According to accounts from residents who saw Osama from a distance, Israeli soldiers opened fire in his direction when he entered the area. A quadcopter drone ordered him to put down his son, who had been sitting on his shoulders, and to remove his clothes and those of his son, despite the cold. Witnesses who saw what happened tell the family that after he complied, four soldiers approached and restrained him, while a fifth took the child.

At around 8 p.m., staff from the International Committee of the Red Cross contacted al-Shafi and told her they had her son. Accompanied by her father and father-in-law, al-Shafi headed toward al-Maghazi market, where she received her child wrapped in a space blanket.

When she first saw him, she says, his face was pale and yellow, and he looked exhausted. “I thought it was just from the long day he’d been through,” she recalls. “I never imagined Israeli soldiers would just torture a child who’s barely older than a year and a half.”

At that point, the family didn’t know the full extent of what Jawad had been through. His mother held him tightly the minute she saw him, but he immediately began to scream in pain. Something was wrong, al-Shafi recounts. She began examining his body, starting with his head, then moving down to his chest, shoulders, abdomen, and then to his back and hands. Finally, she reached his feet and saw the burns.

The family was unable to take the child to the hospital that night due to difficulties traveling at such a late hour; most of Gaza does not have access to electricity, plunging the Strip into darkness and making nighttime travel dangerous.

The next morning, they took him to the hospital. It was the first day of Eid, March 20. “After they examined him, the doctors concluded that the marks on his legs were clearly the result of torture,” Jawad’s grandfather, Muhammad Abu Nassar, tells Mondoweiss.

Al-Shafi says doctors immediately identified the wounds as consistent with a sharp object being inserted into and removed from the child’s feet.

Holding the child, Jawad’s grandfather points to the toddler’s small trousers, which are stained with blood and punctured with holes.

“The Red Cross team told us the blood on his trousers came from his father, who was shot in the shoulder in front of him,” he says.

Muhammad Abu Nasser says the family does not know how Osama’s blood got on his son’s clothes, but they suspect that the child’s torture took place while he was with his father.

“That would mean that Osama was clearly bleeding next to his son, and both of them were being tortured together,” Muhammad added.

Mondoweiss contacted the hospital staff who treated Jawad, but they could not immediately be reached for comment.

The grandfather says his son Osama had recently been suffering from severe psychological distress and bouts of uncontrollable anger. On the day of the incident, he asked to go out with a friend. His father encouraged him, hoping it would help improve his mood, but less than half an hour later, neighbors informed the family that instead of heading west toward a grocery store to buy sweets for his child, Osama had gone east toward the Yellow Line, just five minutes away on foot.

That was when the soldiers opened fire on him and his child before being detained. The neighbors who witnessed the incident told the family that the quadcopter drone on the scene ordered Osama and Jawad to move 100 meters forward before being instructed to remove their clothes. That was the last thing they saw before both were detained.

When Osama was returned to them in such a state, the family was shocked. The child’s grandfather describes it as a far worse crime than the regular shelling and missile fire to which Palestinians in Gaza continue to be subjected. “Shelling is random,” he says. “It kills men, women, and children alike. But this was deliberate.”

Tareq S. Hajjaj
Tareq S. Hajjaj is the Gaza Correspondent for Mondoweiss and a member of the Palestinian Writers Union. Follow him on Twitter/X at @Tareqshajjaj.