Two Teenagers in Israel Guilty of Killing 16-Year Old Palestinian

Ben David did not testify at trial, but last summer he admitted to carrying out the murder in revenge for the killing of the three Israeli teenagers.

A Jerusalem courtroom convicted two Israeli youths Monday. within the grisly killing of a 16-year-old Palestinian boy whose slaying played in to a sequence of events in that led to last yr’s Gaza war.

The dad, who has attended the court proceeding, wondered why the Israeli military hadn’t ruined the houses of the minors and Ben David as Israel does with suspected Palestinian terrorists.

A Jerusalem court has convicted two Israeli youths over the killing of 16-year-old Palestinian Mohammed Abu Khdeir, who was burned to death in east Jerusalem. It helped to contribute to a wave of violence that ended in the war of 50-days in Gaza.

On Monday, the panel of three judges at the Jerusalem District Court found the minors guilty.

The three have not been formally convicted: under Israeli law, a social worker must first approve convictions of minors, and a last-minute request for a psychiatric evaluation for Mr. Ben-David prevented the court from convicting him.

His attorney repeatedly argued Ben David wasn’t competent to stand trial and wasn’t responsible for his actions at the time of the crimes but brought no psychiatric evaluation supporting those claims – until this past Thursday. One of their initial fraudulent claims was that Abu Khdeir was murdered by his own family after they discovered he was a homosexual.

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”.

Yosef Haim Ben-David leaves the courtroom in Jerusalem, Jul. 2014.

Ben-David has not spoken in court but Muhammad’s family said he was clearly sane and appeared lucid in videos shown in court.

For years Israeli phone operators have been providing 3G to residents of Jewish settlements in the occupied Territories, but many Palestinians also use them by buying SIM cards of Israeli companies on the black market.

“Sometimes it is prohibited to reveal their names and other times they suffer from psychological troubles”, Ayman Odeh, a member of the Israeli parliament, said in a statement.

Ben David reportedly refused to defend himself during the trial.

Days after the three Israelis abducted Mohammed from his backyard they gave a full admission to the police.

The peace process with the Palestinians broke down early previous year, so the practical implications of the announcement were not immediately clear.

As part of its collective punishment policy against the Palestinian people, Israel has refused to deliver the bodies of 38 Palestinians killed in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem.

Adnan Al-Husseiny, minister of Jerusalem affairs in the Palestinian government, talked to media after they found the body saying that this cruel murder of the child, burning him alive is cruel, and he remarked how the tension between Israeli and Palestinian would escalate quickly because of that.

Although they evaded capture for several months, Amer Abu Aysha and Marwan Kawasme were eventually shot and killed by Israeli forces.