13 wedding revelers indicted for celebrating killing of Palestinian baby
8 adults, 5 minors charged with incitement to terror for dancing with and stabbing photos of slain Dawabsha family
Prosecutors on Wednesday filed indictments against 13 people who allegedly led dances at a wedding where revelers sang songs calling for attacks on Palestinians, and stabbed photos showing a Palestinian baby killed in an alleged Jewish terror attack.
Among those indicted at the Jerusalem Magistrate’s court was the groom, Yakir Ashbel, 21, from Yad Binyamin.
Five of those indicted are minors aged 14-17.
The indictments — for charges of incitement to violence, supporting a terror group, racist incitement, and weapons offenses — were filed with the approval of Attorney-General Avichai Mandelblit, due the nature of the charges against the suspects.
Ashbel’s December 2015 wedding, which was attended by some 500 people in Jerusalem, made headlines after footage emerged of dozens of right-wing activists celebrating a firebombing attack that had killed three members of a Palestinian family in the West Bank village of Duma several months earlier.
Wedding-goers were caught on film dancing with guns, knives and a mock Molotov cocktail. One of them, Daniel Pinner, allegedly danced while wearing a T-shirt bearing the slogan “No Arabs, no terror attacks” and waving a yellow T-shirt bearing the clenched fist symbol of the banned Kach terror group.
Kach was declared a terror organization and banned in 1994 under prevention of terror laws.
The video, aired by Channel 10, also showed some holding a photo of 18-month-old Ali Dawabsha, who was burned to death in the July 31 nighttime firebombing on his home, and repeatedly stabbing the picture.
Ali Dawabsha’s parents, Riham and Saad, died of injuries sustained in the firebombing. His brother, Ahmed Dawabsha, 6, the sole survivor of the July 31 attack, spent a year recovering at a hospital in Israel.
In January, a 21-year-old Jewish Israeli, Amiram Ben-Uliel, and an unnamed 16-year-old minor were indicted for carrying out the attack. Ben-Uliel was indicted for murder; the minor, who is not alleged to have directly participated in the firebombing, was charged as an accomplice.
The crowd in the wedding video also chanted the lyrics of a song that include a Biblical verse from Judges 16:28, quoting Samson, blinded in Gaza, saying, “Let me with one blow get revenge on the Philistines for my two eyes” — but changing the word “Philistines” to “Palestine.”
Other songs called for destroying the Al-Aqsa Mosque on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem.
According to the indictment, by their actions, the defendants either directly called for acts of violence and terror, or praised violent acts in a manner that could realistically lead to further violent acts.
After the video emerged, Ashbel claimed he had not been aware of the celebrations of the murder at his wedding, which became known in media as the “hate wedding.”
“I didn’t even see it. At my wedding I was in the clouds, not on the ground at all,” he told Channel 10.
He called the footage “shocking,” but insisted at the time that “there were about 600 people at my wedding, and this wasn’t something I agreed to.”
One of the minors indicted, aged 15, faces an additional indictment filed at the Jerusalem Youth Magistrate’s Court of causing malicious damage for a racist motive, damaging property for racist reasons, reckless driving, using a vehicle without permission, driving without a license or insurance, and disturbing a police officer.
The teen is accused of attacking, together with accomplices, Palestinian property in Wadi Fukin in the West Bank and causing NIS 17,000 worth of damage to agricultural equipment and saplings.
