The Israeli military court in Jaffa, today, is looking into the appeal of the soldier Elor Azaria, who killed a wounded Palestinian youth in Hebron, on 24 March, 2016.
Azaria, in February, was sentenced to 18 months in prison in a manslaughter conviction, a move which caused wide criticism against Israeli bias towards the crimes of its soldiers.
According to the PNN, the prosecutors demanded 3 – 5 years in jail, saying that the sentence Azaria received did not match the dangerous nature of his crime.
Media reports said, today, that Azaria’s lawyer will try to refute the prosecutors’ demands by looking at other similar cases of Israeli soldiers who did not recieve harsh punishment for such acts.
The lawyer also said that Azaria was scared that the victim, AbdulFattah Al-Sharif, had an explosive belt and therefore had to shoot him dead immediately.
The graphic shooting video, which was filmed by a Palestinian cameraman from B’Tselem Israeli human rights group, went viral and sparked international rage.
The video shows Elor Azaria talking on the phone, then hanging up and stepping closer to Al-Sharif, and then shooting him in the head from a very close distance in the presence of Israeli ambulances.
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