Family members and friends of 15-year-old Palestinian-American Tariq Abu Khdeir gathered this afternoon at the offices of the Council on American Islamic Relations in Tampa, days after the Tampa youth was brutally attacked by Israeli police officers and is still under house arrest in a neighborhood in East Jerusalem.

"It's really hard for me to see him take so many blows to the head," cried Sanah Abu Khdeir, Tariq's aunt, referring to the video of Israeli officers pummeling the teenager last week. Tariq was in Jerusalem for a summer vacation trip and tragically attended the funeral of his 16-year-old cousin, Mohammed Abu Khdeir, who was burned to death following violence that stemmed from the killings of three missing Israeli teenagers. "He's an American child," she added, saying "we're not being political, we're being human."

Tariq was released yesterday by an Israeli Court but must continue to serve house arrest in Israel. He's also been ordered to pay a $900 fine, which his uncle, Hamdi Swalem, called an "insult to injury."

Swalem said he has lived in the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Shuafat where Tariq and five other Palestinians were arrested by Israeli Police. He says the area for the Palestinians isn't that large, and is surrounded by Israelis living on settlements built by the Israeli government. 

An Israeli police spokesman says the Khdeir and the five other Palestinians were rioting, three of whom were carrying knives, when they were detained. Israeli police also say the video, which shows two officers attacking Tariq while he’s on the ground, is “edited and biased” and that it “does not represent the events.”

Relatives said that they can't wait for Tariq to return to the states, where they say that the blows to his head could amount to a health care bill totaling $200,000, though they didn't clarify how they came up with that estimate. Swalem says that the Israelis should pay his healthcare costs when he returns to Tampa. He said Tariq is still suffering from bad headaches and bloodshot eyes.

The news conference was hosted by CAIR's Hasan Shibley, who called Tariq's beating a "watershed moment on what the Palestinians go through" on a regular basis. The killing of Mohammed Abu Khdeir by Israelis is considered to be a revenge killing, coming in the wake of the kidnapping and killing of three Israeli teenagers in the West Bank last month. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spoke by telephone with Mohammed's father, Hussein Abu Khdeir, earlier today, where he expressed his outrage "over the reprehensible murder of your son," according to the New York Times.

"The violence must stop on all sides," Shibley added later on, though it doesn't appear that is going to be the case anytime soon.

Tariq Abu Khdeir was born in Baltimore but has lived in Tampa since he was five, relatives say. He's currently a sophomore at University Academy of Florida in Temple Terrace.

This article appears in Jul 3-9, 2014.