Two Israeli terrorists responsible for the abduction and murder of Palestinian teenager Mohammed Abu Khdeir in July 2014 were sentenced this week to life in prison and 21 years respectively.
The first killer, aged 17, was convicted of actively helping in Abu Khdeir’s kidnapping and murder that saw the Palestinian youth, aged 16, burned to death in a Jerusalem forest. He was sentenced to life for helping to pour gasoline on the Khdeir, and received a separate three-year sentence and ordered to pay NIS 35,000 (£6,200) in reparations to two Palestinian families.
The second killer, aged 16, helped the 17-year-old and the third suspect to kill the Palestinian teen, and received a 21-year sentence and ordered to pay NIS 30,000 (£5,300) in reparations to the Khdeir family.
The sentences, handed down by the Jerusalem District Court, are rare for minors.
The third suspect, 31-year-old Jerusalem resident Yosef Haim Ben-David, was also convicted in the attack, but has not yet been sentenced while the court considers his claim that he suffers from a mental illness and was not responsible for his actions at the time. Israeli law forbids identifying minors convicted of crimes.
The State Attorney commented that “the verdict expresses the severity of the offences the minors committed – the murder of an innocent teenager around their own age, whose life was cruelly cut short”.
Abu Khdeir was abducted and killed on July 1, 2014, two days after it emerged that three Israeli teens who had been abducted three weeks earlier in the West Bank had been killed by their Palestinian kidnappers shortly after their disappearance.
The violence was a major contributing factor in the breakout of the Operation Protective Edge war with Hamas in Gaza that followed just a week later, and lasted for 50 days.
