Justice Rahel Barkai of the Israeli Be’er Shiva District Court sentenced a rejected an appeal by the Israeli prosecution to sentence a settler to seven years for shooting a Palestinian resident and decided to sentence him only to two consecutive years and one year on parole.
The settler Daniel Finner, 39, a resident of the West Bank settlement of Tapuah, shot and wounded a Palestinian resident of Al Mawassi area in the Gaza Strip, in June 2005.
According to the charges, Finner burst onto the scene with a loaded Uzi submachine gun and began firing in the air and directly at the Palestinians.
One Palestinian man was severely wounded by the gunfire and was rushed to a hospital to be operated upon.
The attack was carried out three months before Israel implemented the Disengagement Plan.
The settler was among an extremist settlers group that attacked Palestinian families staying near the Gaza Beach.
Israeli online daily Haaretz reported that Finner was at a hotel occupied by the settlers at the Gaza beach. He was carrying out maintenance work on the hotel’s electricity system.
The assailant told the court that he cannot understand why is the court making a “big deal out of shooting a Palestinian resident”.
The Israeli prosecution demanded the court to sentence the resident to seven years imprisonment and to compensate the injured resident, but the court rejected the appeal.
Justice Barkai did not rule the the Finner should be disarmed but decided to bar him from carrying his gun outside the borders of his settlement, Tapuah.
She also said in her ruling that the assailant “did not think that wounding a Palestinian was of any importance, and returned calmly to the hotel after the event. Later, he returned to his home in Tapuah, completely confident that he would not be punished for his actions", yet he received a mild sentence.
