Exclusive: 15 Congress members write to Marco Rubio about nine-month detention of Mohammed Ibrahim
Fifteen members of Congress have written to Marco Rubio, the US secretary of state, demanding to know what steps the United States has taken in response to the mistreatment of a Palestinian-American teenager who spent nine months in Israeli detention.
The letter, led by Senator Peter Welch and first seen by the Guardian, is centered around the case of Mohammed Ibrahim, a Florida resident who was 15 when Israeli soldiers arrested him during a raid on his family’s West Bank home in February 2025. He was charged with throwing objects at moving vehicles before being released on 27 November following a guilty plea and suspended sentence, and was taken directly to hospital upon his return.
The then 16-year-old was severely underweight, having lost roughly a third of his body weight, and had suffered a scabies skin infection a few months into his detention, the state department told his family at the time, according to correspondences seen by the Guardian.
Mohammed told family members and US consular officers that he and other Palestinian minors held in the same cell were beaten, threatened, pepper-sprayed and denied adequate food and medical care over the course of his detention.
