Israel arrests 14-year-old US citizen
Mohammad Khaleq is one of more than 8,000 Palestinian children held by Israel since the year 2000.
On April 11, in one of the trailer caravans that house the Israeli military courtrooms at Ofer prison, three boys sat in the brown Israeli Prison Service shabas uniform. Their feet shackled, their eyes darting between the judge, their lawyers, and their families. The youngest was 14-year-old Mohammad Khaleq, a short, skinny boy with a light brown birthmark under his right eye and a heart murmur since birth. Mohammad was arrested from his home in the village of Silwad, near Ramallah, in a 2:00am raid on Friday April 5. Eight heavily armed soldiers burst in to the modest home, waking the Khaleq family - the two parents and six children, the youngest just six years old - and gathered them in one room. "The soldiers thought they had come to arrest me," Mohammad's father, 46-year-old Abdelwahab, told Al Jazeera. "When they saw that Mohammad was just a kid they felt embarrassed, but they still took him away."
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