American Settler Gets Life for Killing Palestinians
Image by haaretz
A West Bank settler dubbed “The Jewish Terrorist” by the Israeli media was sentenced on Tuesday to life imprisonment for the murder of two Palestinians in 1997.
Yaakov “Jack” Tytell, a U.S. immigrant, confessed to the killings, which he committed while visiting as a tourist. He was convicted in January of killing a Palestinian taxi driver in Jerusalem and a shepherd near the West Bank city of Hebron.
Efforts by Tytell’s lawyers, one whom quoted him as saying he had been on a “mission from God”, to have him declared insane failed.
After his arrest in 2009, he told investigators he had acted alone and was not part of any anti-Arab Jewish underground.
Sentencing Tytell to two consecutive life terms and an additional 30 years, a Jerusalem court said that in May 1997, he “decided to kill an Arab” and shot the taxi driver in the head after ordering him to pull over.
Three months later, “the defendant decided to kill another Palestinian”, shooting the shepherd twice in the chest along a West Bank road.
Tytell immigrated to Israel in 2001 and moved to a settlement in the occupied West Bank. In 2008, he planted bombs that injured a left-wing Israeli academic and a teenager who belonged to a group of Jews who follow the teachings of Jesus.
Israel captured the West Bank in a 1967 war and there are now hundreds of thousands of Jewish settlers on occupied land. Palestinians want the West Bank as part of a future state, but talks with Israel have been frozen since 2010.
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning journalism this Passover.
In this age of misinformation, our work is needed like never before. We report on the news that matters most to American Jews, driven by truth, not ideology.
At a time when newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall. That means for the first time in our 126-year history, Forward journalism is free to everyone, everywhere. With an ongoing war, rising antisemitism, and a flood of disinformation that may affect the upcoming election, we believe that free and open access to Jewish journalism is imperative.
Readers like you make it all possible. Right now, we’re in the middle of our Passover Pledge Drive and we need 500 people to step up and make a gift to sustain our trustworthy, independent journalism.
Make a gift of any size and become a Forward member today. You’ll support our mission to tell the American Jewish story fully and fairly.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.
Our Goal: 500 gifts during our Passover Pledge Drive!
