Palestinian teen terrorist says prisoners, guards harassing him

The 13-year-old Palestinian implicated in a terrorist attack in Jerusalem earlier this month has complained of harassment by Israeli jailers, and has been transferred from cell to cell, Walla news reported Tuesday.

Ahmed Manasra was arrested after his release from Jerusalem’s Hadassah Hospital last week and his remand was extended by the Jerusalem Magistrate’s Court on Sunday by additional six days.

Ahmed and his cousin Hassan Manasra allegedly stabbed two Israelis, a 13-year-old and a 25-year-old, in a terror attack in Jerusalem’s Pisgat Ze’ev neighborhood. Ahmed, the younger of the stabbers, was seriously injured when he was hit by a car while trying to flee the scene of the attack in the capital’s Pisgat Ze’ev neighborhood. He was treated in Jerusalem’s Hadassah Hospital and arrested upon his release. His 15-year-old cousin was shot dead by security forces after charging at police with a knife.

The investigation into the incident is ongoing.

“I request not to be brought here anymore, the prison guards and prisoners humiliate me,” Manasra told the court. His lawyers said they plan to file a complaint over alleged abuse, threats and harassment of Manasra by prison guards.

At the hearing, Manasra’s lawyer restated his client’s claim that he didn’t stab the two Israelis. “He indeed held a knife, but he didn’t stab anyone,” attorneys Tareq Barghout and Lea Tsemel was quoted by Walla telling the court. “His cousin is the one who stabbed. It’s a 13-year-old boy who isn’t responsible for his actions.”

“I didn’t stab anybody because I don’t like blood,” he told investigators earlier this month.

“In the middle [of the attack],” he explained, “I changed my mind. The person who actually committed the stabbings was Hassan,” he claimed, according to a report on the Walla news site.

The two Israelis who were stabbed and seriously wounded in the attack were both released from the hospital earlier this week.

Manasra is the youngest attacker in a wave of Palestinian stabbing and shooting attacks against Israelis that began at the start of this month. The average age of the attackers is estimated at between 19 and 20 years old.

Manasra became the center of an Israeli-Palestinian diplomatic spat after Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas spoke out against “aggression by Israel and its settlers, who commit terror against our people,” and who “execute our children in cold blood, as they did to the child Ahmed Manasra and other children in Jerusalem and elsewhere.”

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu accused Abbas of spreading “incitement and lies” in his claim. An official from Abbas’s office later walked back the accusation, saying the PA chief was misled.