The Israeli Magistrates Court in Jerusalem sentenced, on Sunday, an Israeli settler from a West Bank illegal settlement to 18 months imprisonment after convicting him of kidnapping and attacking a Palestinian teen. The settler also killed one of the goats of the teen in Hebron, in the southern part of the West Bank.
The court also ordered the settler to pay NIS 50.000 in compensation for harm inflicted on the teen.
Israeli daily, Haaretz, reported that the verdict concluded that the settler, Tzvi Struk from Aish Kodesh settlement in the Gush Shiloh Bloc, accompanied by another settler who remained unidentified, approached some Palestinians from a Hebron village while firing rounds of live ammunition in the air, and that Struk and his friend kidnapped the 15-year-old Palestinian teenager and beat him all over his body.
The two settlers bound the teenager and covered his face before kidnapping him and driving away from the scene. While driving away, the Palestinian teen was beaten until he lost consciousness.
In his verdict, Jude Amon Cohen said that he was shocked by the serious wounds inflicted on the Palestinian teen, and that any sentence that does not include active prison term will not be sufficient in light to the harm inflicted on the teen, Haaretz, said.
Yet, the settler, convicted of kidnapping and attacking the teen, received the 18-month term.
Haaretz said that the settler’s mother, Orit, criticized the court for its verdict, and claimed that this ruling is a “victory to lying Arabs who are waging a war against Jewish farmers”.
This attack is one of hundreds of instances where Israeli settlers in the West Bank attacked, wounded and killed Palestinians.
Last year, a group of fundamentalist Israeli settlers broke into a mosque in Beit Fajjar, near Bethlehem, and set it ablaze. Settlers also torched the main mosque of the al-Lubban al-Sharqiyya village, south of the northern West Bank city of Nablus. In 2009, settlers torched a mosque in Yasuf Palestinian village, near the central West Bank city of Salfit.
Under International Law and the Fourth Geneva Conventions settlements are illegal and constitute war crimes.
