Mohammed Abu Khdeir murder: Israeli court found two Israeli teenagers guilty

Abu Khedir, a Palestinian from Shuafat in east Jerusalem, was abducted from a sidewalk outside a mosque on July 2, 2014 and taken to a vehicle driven by Ben David, 31, court records indicate, according to the Associated Press.

The judge found that the two youths beat Abu Khudair unconscious in the back seat while Ben David drove into the forest.

The parents of a Palestinian teenager who was burned alive in a brutal revenge attack in Jerusalem in 2014 have said the decision to postpone the sentencing of alleged ringleader Yosef Haim Ben David by an Israeli court felt like reliving the day that their son, Mohammed Abu Khdeir, was murdered. “This is a lie”, he told Israeli Army Radio. The confrontation escalated into a 50-day war in which more than 2,200 Palestinians, the majority of them civilians, were killed, according to United Nations figures.

The killing of the three triggered an Israeli crackdown on Hamas in the territory, to which the militant group responded by stepping up rocket fire on Israel from the Gaza Strip, which it controls.

“With all those projects, we will need to re-examine whether it is feasible to consider the European Union as a partner while it is using measures of discrimination and boycott against the State of Israel”, he continued, prompting his Palestinian counterpart Riyad Al-Maliki to condemn the move as a “stupid threat” revealing Israel’s enmity towards Europe.

The two men, who were minors at the time and whose names can not be reported, were found guilty of murder yesterday (Monday) in a relatively rare instance of Israelis being convicted for killing a Palestinian.

Abu Khdeir was kidnapped off an East Jerusalem street and put in a auto.

The PLO Negotiations Affairs Department have accused Israel of orchestrating “systematic ethnic cleansing of Palestinians” by restructuring the fundamental character of East Jerusalem.

“Every time the trial is happening we feel it coming all at once again”, said Ansam who tearfully explained the 22 court sessions in the past year were a constant reminder of the gruesome way in which Mohammed was killed.

The court announced that the hearings for sentencing of the two teens, who have not been identified due to being minors when the crime occurred, would start during January. Abu Khdeir’s killing led to the worst riots in Jerusalem in a decade, spreading to Palestinian cities in Israel and the West Bank. He said Ben David, who was driving, stopped next to five “small children” before finding Muhammad.

Mrs Netanyahu told students at Lucien de Hirsch secondary school, “The State of Israel is your home”.

Ben-David’s non-conviction arose as a result of a last-minute mental health assessment submitted to the court on Thursday which, unusually, was written in English by an Israeli psychiatrist.

It was unclear if the verdicts would assuage fury over a perceived double standard in Israel’s treatment of Jewish and Muslim suspects.

The unrest-crackdown dialogue between Palestinians and Israeli security forces has now been going on for well over a year. One of their initial fraudulent claims was that Abu Khdeir was murdered by his own family after they discovered he was a homosexual.