East Jerusalem teens sentenced for stabbing elderly Jewish women

Two East Jerusalem residents were sentenced to 18 years in prison on Monday for stabbing two elderly Jewish women in a terror attack in the capital last year.

The two were sentenced by the Jerusalem District Court for attempted murder, while a third man involved in the attack received a 25-month prison term for conspiracy to commit a crime and obstruction of justice.

The three, all residents of the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Jabel Mukaber, were minors at the time of the attack on May 10, 2016.

The two attackers stabbed the two women, who were among a group of five elderly Israelis walking along the Armon Hanatziv promenade in the capital — in an area known as the Peace Forest — before fleeing the scene, the judge said in sentencing them.

The victims, aged 82 and 86, were hospitalized in moderate condition. One of the women was a Holocaust survivor.

The judge said the attack was premeditated and that the assailants wanted to murder Jews in order to be “martyrs.”

The third teenager, who helped plan, but did not actually take part in the stabbing, told investigators he decided not to join his friends in the terror attack “for fear that it would cause his parents’ home to be destroyed,” police said at the time of the Jabel Mukaber residents’ arrest last year, over a week after the attack.

The Arab neighborhood of Jabel Mukaber borders the Jewish Armon Hanatziv, an area that has been the site of contention for years, with occasional rock and Molotov cocktail attacks.

It is also the home of a number of other terrorists who have carried out attacks in Jerusalem in recent years, including Fadi al-Qunbar, who, in a ramming attack at the Haas-Sherover Promenade in Armon HaNatziv, killed four IDF soldiers on a field trip, last January.