At least 18 Israelis, one Palestinian, and one American student have been killed in attacks by Palestinians in the past two months.
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“When we attempt to maintain that we’re better than our enemies – and that I believe that we’re better than them – we should look only at that occasion as a mirror”, he said.
The judge found that the two youths beat Abu Khudair unconscious in the back seat while Ben David drove into the forest.
Hamas condemned what it called “the exoneration” of Ben David, describing him as the Jewish settler who killed Abu Khdeir. The murder sparked an uprising in East Jerusalem referred to by Palestinians as “the Abu Khdeir intifada”.
The 16-year-old Khdair was brutally murdered in an apparent revenge attack for the murder of three Israeli teens by a Hamas militant in the West Bank.
Near the Jewish settlement of Einav, also in the West Bank, a Palestinian woman was shot dead by an Israeli officer whom she had attempted to stab, the army said.
Muhammad’s death was soon followed by the 2014 war in Gaza, which killed more than 2,000 Palestinians and 70 Israelis, mostly soldiers, while reducing many neighborhoods in the Strip to rubble.
The Jerusalem court said in a statement Monday the psychiatric evaluation of Ben-David was submitted only a few days before a verdict was due, “contrary to proper and appropriate procedure”. “The court has today ruled that the three accused had carried out, the barbaric crime of kidnapping an innocent person, only because of his origin, and burned him to death”, Korb said.
Two teens in Israel have been found guilty of murdering a young Palestinian. The court heard he was then beaten and had petrol poured down his throat, before being set alight.
Ben David confessed, incriminating the two minors, and they were all put on remand for eight days.
The two teenagers, whose names have not been released, have confessed in court, while the older suspect, Ben David, has pled insanity. While the harshest penalty for murder for an adult is life in prison, there is no standard maximum sentence in Israel for minors convicted of the same crimes, said Mohanned Jabara, a lawyer representing the Abu Khdeir family. They will be sentenced next month.
Abu Khdeir was kidnapped off an East Jerusalem street and put in a vehicle. The Palestinians say the violence is rooted in frustration over a lack of hope for obtaining independence.
An adviser to the Palestine Liberation Organization, Xavier Abu Eid, tweeted that the Abu Khdeir case was “an example of how cheap Palestinian lives are for Israel”.
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The incidents came a day after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas shared a rare handshake at a global climate conference in Paris, but no substantial talks were reported.
