Israeli Teens Found Guilty In 2014 Killing Of Palestinian Youth

Prosecutors said the three had confessed to abducting, bludgeoning, strangling and burning Mohammed Abu Khudair, 16, in revenge for the killing days earlier of three Israeli youths by Hamas militants in the occupied West Bank.

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. One of the teens then doused the young victim with petrol before David lit a match and set him on fire while he was still alive.

Many Israelis say the reprisal killing, which was broadly condemned as it exposed Israel to charges that it turned a blind eye toward Jewish extremism appalled them.

Moreover if the court rules Ben-David was not mentally sound when he committed the kidnapping and murder, Ben-David will evade life in prison and serve time in a psychiatric ward until he is deemed mentally fit and released.

“The family are very disappointed – they said to me today that any Palestinian who does something to a Jewish Israeli is dealt with on the spot – he is killed or judged and punished on the spot – but on the other hand our son was burnt alive and even after a year and a half we still haven’t received our judgement”.

Attorneys for Ben-David submitted a psychiatric evaluation just days ago that calls into question whether he was responsible for his actions at the time of his crime.

The judges found that Mr Ben David, who during the trial was portrayed as the ringleader, had participated in the abduction and murder.

Hussein, Mohammad Abu Khdair’s father, said Mr Ben David was attempting to mislead the court.

Ben David’s lawyer, Asher Ohayon, is a representative of the right-wing “Zionist legal aid organization” Honenu, which has a track record of securing watered-down convictions for Jewish Israeli defendants accused of nationalist hate crimes. Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Yaalon has said the suspects were known have not been arrested to protect intelligence sources. Another one of his cousins, a 19-year-old who has the same name as him, Mohammed Abu Khdeir, has been held by the Israeli police since a July 28 protest.

An aide to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas said it was “unprecedented” for the court to accept the insanity plea the day of the verdict, rather than during the subsequent appeal. Arab women are going to university and working, and the number of births in Arab families has gone down – a sign of rising living standards.

There is also the lawlessness of Israel’s extrajudicial killings of Palestinians who are suspected of a crime, or caught carrying out a crime.

Ansam, who has attended nearly every court session since the trial began, said she did not expect the family to receive justice. “When we try to claim we are better than our enemies… we will always have this incident as a mirror”, Corb said.

An autopsy at Israel’s Abu Kabir Forensic Institute in the presence of a Palestinian pathologist found that the boy had been burned alive.