TerrorismTwo Israeli teenagers receive long sentences for murdering Palestinian boy
Two Israeli teenagers were sentenced to long jail terms for kidnapped the Palestinian teenager Mohammed Abu Khdeir in 2014, and burning him to death. The older of the two, aged 17, was sentenced to life in prison, while the other teenager, a 16-year old, was sentenced to twenty-one years. The 16-year-old Abu Khdeir was grabbed off the street and beaten. He was then taken to a forest outside Jerusalem, and was set afire while he was still alive.
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Two Israeli teenagers were sentenced to long jail terms for kidnapped the Palestinian teenager Mohammed Abu Khdeir in 2014, and burning him to death.
The older of the two, aged 17, was sentenced to life in prison, while the other teenager, a 16-year old, was sentenced to twenty-one years.
The 16-year-old Abu Khdeir was grabbed off the street and beaten. He was then taken to a forest outside Jerusalem, and was set afire while he was still alive.
The Daily Mail reports that the oldest teenager was given twenty-eight years — the 25-year maximum life sentence for a minor, with another three years added. The younger boy received a lesser sentence because the court ruled he was not involved in actual murder, but was involved only in the kidnapping and subduing of Abu Khdeir. part in the acts leading up to it.
Legal analysts noted that both sentences were unusually long for minors in Israel – and especially long for Israeli Jews who killed Palestinians. The stark disparity between the harsh punishments given to Palestinians who killed Jews relative to the light punishments given to Jews who killed Palestinians has recently led the U.S. ambassador to Israel to note, in a public speech, that Israel was operating two separate systems of justice in the occupied West Bank – one for Jews and one for Palestinians.
The Mail notes that Mohammed’s family was unhappy with the sentences, arguing that both offenders should have been given life sentences.
The adult ringleader, Yosef Ben David, 31, has not yet been sentenced because the court is considering his lawyers’ contention that he was insane when the crime was committed.
The 2 July 2014 kidnaping of Abu Khdeir, who lived in in Shuafat, a neighborhood in east Jerusalem, was caught on CCTV, which was used as evidence in the trial.
In their interrogation, the three killers said they killed Abu Khdeir as an act of revenge following the funerals of three Jewish teenagers who had been kidnapped and killed by Hamas operatives while hitchhiking in the occupied territories a month earlier.
Abu Khdeir was not the killers’ first target. They first attempted to kidnap 7-year old Moussa Zalum – believing a 7-year old would be easier to handle and that his killing would create more of a shock in the Palestinian community – but his mother noticed them and managed to whisk her son away.
The Abu Khdeir case, like the burning of a Palestinian family in the village of Duma a year later – in both cases, Jewish extremists killed Palestinian civilians by burning them alive – has caused agonizing soul searching among broad segments of Israeli society, with many Israelis believing that the crimes highlight the corrosive and corrupting consequences of Israel’s 49-year occupation of the Palestinian territories.
In their interrogation, the two younger defendants turned on the older ringleader, arguing he had given them pills before the killing. These arguments were repeated in court, but the long sentences suggest that the judges did not believe the two youngsters, instead believing the two were aware of the intended outcome of the abduction.
