JERUSALEM // An Israeli court on Thursday sentenced two Israelis to life and 21 years in prison for the 2014 murder of a 16-year-old Palestinian.
The two were minors when they and a third man snatched Mohammed Abu Khdeir from an east Jerusalem neighbourhood in July 2014, driving him to a Jerusalem forest where he was burnt to death.
The sentencing came as Israeli forces locked down a West Bank town that was home to three Palestinians alleged to have killed a policewoman and wounded another in Jerusalem.
In Jerusalem, Abu Khdeir’s mother, Suha, screamed and cried when the sentences were announced in the small, packed courtroom on Thursday.
Both she and her husband Hussein criticised the decision to sentence one of the defendants to 21 years. He told Israeli Radio the family planned to appeal the shorter sentence to the Israeli supreme court.
“The sentence imposed on the defendants reflects what we asked for and the barbaric and atrocious act”, said Ori Korb, the state prosecutor. He said the murder marked a “moral nadir”.
Life sentences were the maximum available to the three-judge panel at the Jerusalem district court.
The defendant sentenced to 21 years, the younger of the pair who was said to have psychiatric problems, was found to have remained in the car when Abu Khdeir was killed.
Israeli settler Yosef Haim Ben-David, 31, is said to have led the attack but his lawyers say he suffers from a mental illness and was not responsible for his actions at the time.
The court has found that he committed the crime but is yet to rule if he is mentally competent.
The two others were 16 at the time of the murder but are now 18. The court, which has not identified them because they were minors at the time, said they were from ultra-Orthodox Jewish families.
Abu Khdeir’s murder was carried out in revenge for the abduction and killing earlier that summer of three Israeli teenagers. The abduction and killing was alleged by Israel to have been carried out by Hamas operatives.
Israel subsequently rounded up Hamas members in the West Bank, sparking a barrage of rocket fire from the Gaza Strip into Israel. Days after the murder of Mohammed, Israel began air strikes in Gaza, plunging the Palestinian territory into 50 days of war. During the violence, 2,200 Palestinians were killed, the majority civilians, along with 73 Israelis, the majority soldiers.
Meanwhile, residents and Palestinian police in Qabatiya, near Jenin, said all entrances to the northern West Bank town had been locked down as Israeli forces carried out a major operation overnight and into Thursday.
It came a day after three Palestinian men from the town, believed to be 19 to 20 years old, were shot dead by Israeli soldiers on Wednesday outside Jerusalem’s Old City.
They were identified by the Palestinian Maan news agency as Ahmad Rajeh Ismail Zakarneh, Muhammad Ahmad Hilmi Kamil, and Najeh Ibrahim Abu Al Rub.
Israeli police accused them of attacking two Israeli policewomen, killing one.
The homes of the three men were searched and around a dozen acquaintances or relatives arrested during the Israeli military operation.
Clashes also broke out between stone-throwing residents and soldiers. A 15-year-old was transported to hospital after being hit by an Israeli jeep and four people were wounded by Israeli gunfire, according to Palestinian medics.
Around ten residents of the town of some 15,000 people have been killed in the wave of violence that began at the start of last October.
Since then, more than 160 Palestinians have been killed, many of them teenagers, according to Maan. Twenty-six Israelis have been killed in the same time period.
Following Wednesday’s incident, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu met with top security officials, who decided to bolster forces in the northern West Bank, an official said.
Also on Thursday, two 13-year-old Palestinian girls were arrested in the town of Ramle, central Israel. They were alleged to have stabbed and lightly wounded a security guard at a bus station.
* Associated Press, Agence France-Presse