Court to hold hearing on delaying start of Azaria’s prison term

A military appeals court announced on Monday that it would hold a hearing on delaying the start of the prison sentence of a former IDF soldier convicted of shooting dead a wounded Palestinian stabber, a day before he is set to be put behind bars.

On Sunday, Elor Azaria asked the Military Court of Appeals to put off his 18-month prison sentence, due to start on Wednesday, until the IDF chief of staff responded to a request for leniency that he made last week.

The military prosecution fired back a response on Monday, objecting to Azaria’s request for a delay.

“Deferring a punishment is the exception to the rule,” the prosecutors wrote in their decision. “A soldier who has committed an offense, and certainly one who has committed such a serious offense like the one the defendant has been found guilty of, should serve their sentence immediately.”

As Azaria is expected to enter Prison Four in Tzrifin base in central Israel on Wednesday at 10 a.m., the court’s hearing on the sentence deferral had to be scheduled before then.

In a letter, sent by Azaria’s attorney Yoram Sheftel on Monday, the convicted former soldier asked the court to hear his request, saying the case’s “uniqueness” justified a delay and that a ruling determining the sentence must start on the court-mandated date was “baseless.”

Azaria was tried for shooting dead Abdel Fattah al-Sharif, approximately 11 minutes after the Palestinian assailant had been shot, injured and disarmed while trying to stab two soldiers in the West Bank city of Hebron on March 2016.

The divisive case revealed deep rifts in Israeli society with some seeing Azaria as a hero, while to others consider him a villain.

He was convicted by a district-level military court in January. Two months later, Azaria’s attorneys appealed the verdict.

On July 30, Azaria’s conviction and sentence were upheld by a military court, which dismissed his testimony that he’d feared for his life, citing his nonchalance in the moments before he opened fire and killed al-Sharif.

Shortly after the appeals court’s verdict, IDF Chief of Staff Gadi Eisenkot said in a statement that he would seriously consider a request for leniency from Azaria. However, a senior military source later clarified that that would only be an option if Azaria expressed “real” remorse for his actions, something Azaria had not done up until that point.

In a personal letter, Azaria asked Eisenkot to commute his 18-month sentence to a punishment of community service. However, he did not express regret for his actions.

Such contrition was also absent from his first-ever public statement, which he posted as a video to Facebook last Thursday. “I promise you that I acted out of a sense of immediate danger at the scene of the attack. But the court gave its ruling, and we live in a nation of laws. So I’m going to serve the prison sentence handed down, in the hope that it will be reduced,” he said.

Eisenkot has in the past expressed criticism of a public perception of Azaria as “everybody’s child.” He also said the case was rife with “manipulations and lies.”

Times of Israel staff contributed to this report.