The family of Mohammed Ibrahim, a Palestinian American boy who has been detained by Israel since February, is demanding that an independent doctor assess the teenager’s condition amid alarming reports about his situation in prison.
Mohammed’s uncle, Zeyad Kadur, said an official from the United States embassy in Israel visited the 16-year-old last week at Ofer Prison.
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The official told the family afterwards that Ibrahim had lost weight and dark circles were forming around his eyes, Kadur told Al Jazeera.
The consular officer also said he had raised Mohammed’s case with multiple US and Israeli agencies.
“This is the first time in nine months that they showed grave concern for his health, so how bad is it?” Kadur asked in an interview on Wednesday.
Despite rights groups and US lawmakers pleading for Mohammed’s release, Israel has refused to free him, and his family said the administration of President Donald Trump is not doing enough to bring him home.
Israeli authorities have accused Ibrahim of throwing rocks at settlers in the occupied West Bank, an allegation he denies.
But the legal proceedings in the case are moving at a snail’s pace in Israel’s military justice system, according to Mohammed’s family.
Rights advocates also say that the military court system in the occupied West Bank is part of Israel’s discriminatory apartheid regime, given its conviction rate of nearly 100 percent for Palestinian defendants.
Adding to the Ibrahim family’s angst is the lack of access to the teenager while Mohammed is in Israeli prison. Unable to visit him or communicate with him, his relatives are only able to receive updates from the US embassy.
The teenager has been suffering from severe weight loss while in detention, his father, Zaher Ibrahim, told Al Jazeera earlier this year. He also contracted scabies, a contagious skin infection.
The last visit he received from US embassy staff was in September.
Israeli authorities have committed well-documented abuses against Palestinian detainees, including torture and sexual violence, especially after the start of Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza in October 2023.
“We hear and see people getting out of prison and what they look like, and we know it’s bad,” Kadur said.
“Mohammed is an American kid who was taken at 15. He is now 16, and he’s been sitting there for nine months and hasn’t seen his mom, hasn’t seen his dad.”
He added that the family is also concerned about Mohammed’s mental health.
“We’re requesting that he gets sent to a hospital and evaluated by a third party, not by a prison medic or nurse. He needs some actual attention,” Mohammed’s uncle told Al Jazeera.
Mohammed, who is from Florida, was visiting Palestine when in the middle of the night he was arrested, blindfolded and beaten in what Kadur described as a “kidnapping”.
The US Department of State did not respond to Al Jazeera’s request for comment on the latest consular visit to Mohammed.
When Secretary of State Marco Rubio visited Israel last month, he appeared to have misheard a question about Palestinian prisoner Marwan Barghouti and thought it was about Mohammed’s case.
“Are you talking about the one from the US? I don’t have any news for you on that today,” Rubio told reporters.
“Obviously, we’ll work that through our embassy here and our diplomatic channels, but we don’t have anything to announce on that.”
But for Kadur, Mohammed’s case is not a bureaucratic or legal matter – it is one that requires political will from Washington to secure his freedom.
Kadur underscored that the US has negotiated with adversaries, including Venezuela, Russia and North Korea, to free detained Americans, so it can push for the release of Mohammed from its closest ally in the Middle East.
The US provided Israel with more than $21bn in military aid over the past two years.
Kadur drew a contrast between the lack of US effort to free Mohammed and the push to release Edan Alexander, a US citizen who was volunteering in the Israeli army and was taken prisoner during Hamas’s attacks on southern Israel on October 7, 2023.
Alexander was released in May after pressure from the Trump administration on Hamas.
“The American government negotiated with what they consider a terrorist organisation, and they secured his release – an adult who put on a uniform, who picked up a gun and did what he signed up for,” Kadur said of Alexander.
“Why is a 16-year-old still there for nine months, rotting away, deteriorating in a prison? That’s one example to show that Mohammed – and his name and his Palestinian DNA – [are] not considered American enough by the State Department first and by the administration second.”