Walid is one of at least 94 Palestinians killed in Israeli dungeons since the start of the genocide in the Gaza Strip.
Walid, who held Brazilian citizenship, was a budding athlete who played football at Al-Asour Academy in Silwad. “He participated in several local tournaments, and won multiple awards,” according to an Al-Haq report from April this year.
A 12th-grade student, Walid had no prior health issues at the time of his abduction. However, his health suddenly took a turn for the worse in Israeli captivity. “During court hearings, his health visibly deteriorated: in the second session, he appeared weak due to malnutrition, and in the third session, he showed clear signs of illness,” Al-Haq report added.
“During a court session on 10 February 2025, according to his father, Walid showed severe symptoms and reported suffering from scabies and an amoeba, requesting medical treatment. Some released prisoners confirmed that his condition had been stable before his death, but his family was unable to visit him due to a ban on visits imposed by the occupation authorities.”
Abused and starved to death
The Israeli organisation Physicians for Human Rights-Israel (PHRI) revealed in a report published in November 2025 that Walid had died due to “severe and prolonged malnutrition.”
“A physician representing the family who attended the post-mortem examination, conducted six days after his death, noted in a preliminary report signs suggestive of acute malnutrition: Ahmad had almost no fat tissue or muscle mass, and according to IPS [Israel Prison Service] medical records, his BMI at the time of death was approximately 15,” the PHRI report stated.
A healthy BMI ranges from 18.5 to 24.9. Walid’s BMI of approximately 15 — a drastically low figure for someone who had been an active, healthy footballer before his abduction — underscored the severe deprivation and starvation that he endured in Israeli dungeons.
Walid had told the prison authorities that he was being starved. Furthermore, as has been documented in Israeli dungeons, particularly since the start of the genocide in the Gaza Strip in October 2023, the deliberately unhygienic conditions at Megiddo Prison further accelerated the deterioration of his health:
The report also found evidence of acute colitis and scabies. His IPS medical file showed that Ahmad had been examined twice by a prison physician in the months preceding his death for treatment of scabies. As early as December 2024, he had told the prison physician that he did not have adequate access to food.
The post-mortem examination identified starvation as the primary cause of Walid’s death:
The post-mortem findings indicated that Walid suffered from severe and prolonged malnutrition, inflammation of a section of the colon, and the presence of a large amount of air in the soft tissues of the chest and abdomen, likely originating from the lungs.
No help from prison authorities
One of the children detained in the same prison revealed details of Walid’s final moments.
The unnamed child told an attorney a day after Walid’s death that Walid was very sick and that, when he ultimately collapsed in his prison cell, the children did all they could to assist him as he lay dying. Their calls to the prison guards for help for Walid failed to budge the Israelis. They only acted to remove Walid’s body after he had died in his cell.
“A detained minor held in the same prison and who witnessed Ahmad’s collapse told an attorney who visited him the day after the incident that an illness had been spreading among the prison population, with symptoms including stomach pain, headaches, diarrhea, and loss of consciousness He said that Ahmad had also contracted this illness,” the PHRI report said.
“According to his testimony, Walid stepped out of his cell into the prison yard when he suddenly collapsed. Other detained minors tried to assist him and called for help from the guards, but the guards refused to help. When they realized he had died, they carried his body to the entrance of the prison wing, where guards eventually came and removed him.”
Withholding Walid’s body
Having killed him within six months of his abduction, the Israelis refused to hand over Walid’s body to his family. The family had to take the legal route and wait 600 days in anguish and hope just to be able to bury their child, who had been abducted on the mere suspicion of throwing Molotov cocktails.
Walid’s family had exhausted every available avenue, with their attorney, Nadia Dakka, having reached out to the Israeli army, the defence minister, the police, and the then-military advocate general, Maj. Gen. Yifat Tomer-Yerushalmi. Only after all this back-and-forth did the Jewish state announce that it would return his body on November 8. This came more than a year after Dakka had filed a petition seeking its release.
“The fact that his body was held is an injustice, just as the decision to close the investigation into his death was an injustice,” Walid’s father, Khaled Ahmad, told Haaretz. “Walid was not sick before his arrest and had no medical problems. This must not be forgotten.”
Walid is one of at least 94 Palestinians killed in Israeli dungeons since the start of the genocide in the Gaza Strip. More than 350 children are currently held in Israeli captivity and enduring horrific abuse. — Palestine Will Be Free
