As my colleague Jodi Rudoren reports, a video posted online appears to show Israeli police officers beating a Palestinian-American boy after his detention on Thursday during protests in East Jerusalem that followed the death of his cousin, a teenager who was kidnapped and killed two days earlier.

Relatives said that video recorded from two angles by witnesses showed two masked police officers hitting and kicking the boy, Tariq Khdeir, 15, a high school sophomore from Tampa, Fla., as they took him into custody with 11 others. A police spokesman, Micky Rosenfeld, accused the boy of “attacking security officers and rioting,” but his father, Salah Abu Khdeir, told The Associated Press that he had witnessed his son’s arrest and insisted that he was not involved in any violence. “I asked my son, ‘Did you throw rocks?’ He said, ‘No,'” Mr. Abu Khdeir said in an interview with CNN.

One of the witness videos, provided to the local broadcaster Palestine Today, was later obtained by the Israeli news site +972. The second clip, originally uploaded to Facebook, was copied and posted on YouTube by Ali Abunimah, a Palestinian-American activist, to illustrate a report on the incident for his Electronic Intifada website.