Father given three life terms for brutally murdering his children

A Netanya man was found guilty on Tuesday by the Petah Tikva District Court and sentenced to three life sentences for the brutal murder of his three young children in 2010.

Itai Ben-Dror, 40, who confessed to the killings, was alsoordered to pay NIS500,000 in compensation to his ex-wife.

Ben-Dror’s attorney said that despite the fact that the killings took place on his ex-wife’s birthday, his client didn’t commit them as an act of revenge against her, but rather from a sense that everyone was “suffering in this world and destined to suffer until death.”

“He thought,” the attorney said, “that he would save them from their misery and believed that this was the only way they could live together, forever.”

According to the indictment, on July 24, 2010, Ben-Dror took his children, Omer, 10; Roni, 8; and Or, 5, to a mall in Netanya and to the circus. That night, he gave them iced tea laced with sleeping pills, and once they were asleep, he gagged them with towels and stabbed each one multiple times with a knife.

According to his testimony, Ben-Dror initially intended to commit suicide with the sleeping pills.

After Ben-Dror was arrested in 2010, a court-ordered psychological evaluation determined that he was mentally fit to be tried and incarcerated. Despite this, the defense asked for a more lenient sentence and an additional evaluation, asserting that Ben-Dror suffers from various psychological illnesses, including depression.

The court on Tuesday granted the request for an additional mental health evaluation.