East Jerusalemite sentenced to 16 years for planning terror attack

A Jerusalem court sentenced an Arab resident of the city to 16 years in prison for planning to carry out a stabbing during a wave of terror attacks in October 2015.

The man, 22-year-old Bahaa Iwisat of the Jabel Mukaber neighborhood, was arrested on October 23, 2015, in the Jewish neighborhood of Nof Zion after residents reported he was acting suspiciously.

When police came, they found that he was hiding a knife up his sleeve. During his interrogation, he said he’d planned to use the knife in a stabbing attack.

He was convicted earlier this year.

According to court papers, Iwisat told investigators that during October 2015 he watched videos on Facebook glorifying Palestinians who had carried out terror attacks as “martyrs,”  and decided that he would carry out an attack himself to achieve martyrdom.

He prepared a farewell later to his family as a form of last will and testament, and then set off with a 12-centimeter (five-inch) knife in his pocket. When he reached Nof Zion he waited in ambush.

“I kept a lookout and waited in order to hunt a policeman or a Jew and stab them with the knife,” he told investigators.

When police approached him and told him to raise his hands they noticed the knife despite his efforts to keep it concealed. The cops sprang forward and wrestled him to the ground before he had a chance to stab them, Iwisat told investigators.

The court noted that it was the action taken by the police that brought the incident to an end without injury and not any reconsideration by the defendant, making his actions fundamentally those of attempted murder.

The lengthy sentence was justified, the court said, because it was a case of attempted murder in a terror attack, “and in particular against the background of the current wave of terror” there was a need to protect public security and create a deterrent.

Since October 2015 there have been a wave of Palestinian attacks against Israeli civilians and security forces including stabbings, shootings, and car-rammings.