Two young Jews were to be sentenced by a Jerusalem court for the 2014 burning alive of 16-year-old Palestinian Mohammed Abu Khdeir.
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A second Israeli was sentenced to 21 years in jail.
State prosecutor Ori Korb told reporters that the long prison terms reflected the “barbaric” and morally twisted nature of the crime. A third convicted Israeli is awaiting sentencing due to an insanity plea.
Abu Khdeir’s family criticized the sentences, which they said were too short, telling Anadolu Agency that they would push for harsher punishments against all of the defendants.
The court’s actions are being closely watched at a time of renewed Israeli-Palestinian tensions.
Abu Khdeir’s killing was part of a spiral of violence that led to a 50-day war in the Gaza Strip in summer 2014. Mohammed, who lived in Shuafat, east Jerusalem, was kidnapped in the early hours of 2 July 2014, his abduction caught on CCTV cameras as he was bundled into a auto. The other two Palestinian men joined in the attack before being overpowered by additional Israeli forces that arrived. But several of the attackers came from the Arab minority inside Israel which makes up around a fifth of the population and rarely engages in political violence.
The extremely young age of the girls, combined with the fact that they were both Israeli citizens living in a relatively peaceful, mixed Jewish-Arab city in central Israel, underscored the spontaneous and random nature of the attacks that have left more than 160 Palestinians and 29 Israelis dead since the start of October. The defendants sentenced on Thursday were minors, aged 17 and 16, when they killed Abu Khudair.
The Israeli military on Thursday sealed off the home village of the three Palestinian men who staged a deadly attack in Jerusalem and carried out a number of arrests there.
It was the first time Palestinians appeared to have coordinated an attack against Israeli security forces.
A deadly firefight broke out Wednesday in the heart of Jerusalem between Israeli police officers and three Palestinian assailants armed with rifles, knives and bombs, Israeli police said.
Abu Khdeir’s death sparked global condemnation and placed pressure on Israel to bring Jewish extremists to justice. And yet one of them only gets 21 years?
Three soldiers were wounded when Amjad Suchri, a policeman who worked as a driver and bodyguard to the Palestinian attorney-general, opened fire on a checkpoint at one of the exits from Ramallah, near Bet El, a settlement north of Jerusalem.
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The oldest minor was also accused of the attempted kidnapping of a seven-year old child, Moussa Zalum, for which he received the additional prison sentence.
