Ahed Tamimi’s cousin was beaten into false confession over brain injuries.

Ahed Tamimi’s cousin was beaten into ‘confessing’ that half of his skull was lost in a bicycle accident rather than from an Israeli rubber bullet.

Mere hours after Mohammed Fadl al-Tamimi left hospital with half of his skull removed and his brain extremely dangerously exposed, Israeli troops arrested the 15-year-old in his home at 3am and, once he was detained, managed to beat him into ‘confessing’ that his injuries were sustained in a ‘bicycle accident’.

Contradicting Mohammed’s impromptu confession of careless cycling, his medical notes still describe a rubber bullet being removed from his brain, and photos of the extracted bullet still exist.

The rubber bullet is the Israeli forces’ non-lethal weapon of choice against unarmed Palestinians. It is actually neither rubber nor non-lethal as described; the majority of the bullet is made of steel with a rubber casing, and they have killed at least 53 civilians since 1990, mostly in Palestine. A paper published in the British Medical Journal concludes that 15% of those hit by rubber bullets suffer severe disabilities akin to Mohammed Tamimi’s.



Despite the story exhibiting more holes than a post-2000s M. Night Shyamalan film, Israeli police and ultra-conservative Zionists quickly seized upon the sham confession as proof that the Israeli attack on unarmed protestors in Nabi Saleh was a hoax, or largely contrived by pro-Palestinian activists for purposes of propaganda.

Yoav Mordechai, Israel’s Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT), celebrated Mohammed’s alleged confession on the agency’s Arabic Facebook page, saying that it ‘continues the Tamimi family’s culture of lies and provocation’ in a post which boasted a photograph of the boy’s disfigured head.