After 15 years in jail, East Jerusalem man convicted of murder granted retrial

Supreme Court orders release of Jamil Srour, says new evidence casts doubt on his guilt in killing during fight between families

The Supreme Court on Wednesday ordered the release of Jamil Srour, 47, a resident of the Shuafat refugee camp in East Jerusalem who was held in prison for 15 years for murder, and granted him the right to a new trial.

In her decision, Judge Dafna Barak-Erez wrote, “I found that the new evidence submitted by the applicant has the potential, at the very least, to undermine the basis for his conviction for the crime of murder, in a manner that justifies holding a retrial in his case.”

Srour has long maintained that he is innocent. He filed a motion for a retrial once before, in 2022, but that motion was rejected. He filed the new request when fresh information came to light that raised significant doubts about his conviction, Hebrew media reported.

The case was brought by the Public Defender’s Office and the Hebrew University Faculty of Law’s Innocence Project.

According to the Public Defender’s Office, in December 2009, during a confrontation between the Srour family and the Abu A’asab family, Anwar Jith, who was not involved in the conflict, was accidentally shot, without knowing who did it at the time.

After the shooting, the Abu A’asab family and the Jith family reached a “sulha” agreement in which the Abu A’asab family took responsibility for the shooting and paid compensation to Jith’s family.

Regardless of that agreement, Jamil Srour was arrested by police as a suspect.

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Srour’s conviction was based on four witnesses from the Abu A’asab family who claimed to have identified him as the shooter, even as their family signed the agreement taking responsibility for Jith’s death. They said they were able to identify him in dim light when he was shooting in their direction, and some claimed that they were able to see him thanks to the muzzle flash that illuminated his face when he fired.

The conviction was also based on the testimony of a witness who was not a member of the rival families, whose hypothesis regarding the identity of the shooter was mistakenly taken as eyewitness evidence.

Srour claims that the court received an “incorrect and incomplete” picture of events, and that the witnesses coordinated their testimony with each other. The new evidence that led to the retrial includes two affidavits from witnesses who have not yet been questioned in the case and a third affidavit from one of the four witnesses who originally testified against Srour.

Researchers believe the rate of wrongful convictions in Israel is five percent, but according to the project, only 31 requests for retrials have been submitted to the Supreme Court since the state was founded.