5 Palestinians Sentenced for Killing 4-Year-Old Jewish Girl
Image by File
An Israeli military court sentenced five Palestinians to 15 years in jail for killing Adele Biton, a four-year-old Jewish girl.
The five, who were minors aged 16-17 at the time of the incident three years ago, were not convicted of premeditated murder because of their young age when they threw stones on the car carrying Biton, causing a collision, Army Radio reported after the sentencing Thursday night.
Instead, the military prosecution indicted the five killers from the West Bank village of Hares with manslaughter. They were identified as Muhammad Mahdi Suleiman, Tamer Ayyad Ahmad Souf, Ammar Abd al-Nayif Souf, Ali Yassin Ali Shamlawi and Muhammad Jumaa Muhammad Kleib.
Biton, the daughter of two Israeli settlers living in the West Bank, was severely injured in March 2013 and died of complications related to her injury in February last year, at the age of four.
The Yesha Council, which represents Israeli settlers living in the West Bank, cited Biton’s case as an example of the severity of stone throwing, which the council’s leaders said was not being dealt with severely enough by authorities.
The military court also ordered Biton’s killers to pay several thousand dollars in damages to the Biton family.
The Forward is free to read, but it isn’t free to produce
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward.
At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse.
Readers like you make it all possible. We’ve started our Passover Fundraising Drive, and we need 1,800 readers like you to step up to support the Forward by April 21. Members of the Forward board are even matching the first 1,000 gifts, up to $70,000.
This is a great time to support independent Jewish journalism, because every dollar goes twice as far.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
