Extremist settler found guilty of terror charges in 2018 killing of Palestinian woman

The Lod-Central District Court found on Monday that an extremist settler youth committed acts of nationalist-motivated manslaughter, aggravated stone throwing at a vehicle, and deliberately damaging a vehicle, all as acts of terror, over a 2018 stone throwing attack he carried out in which Aisha Rabi, a Palestinian mother of eight, was killed when the rock he threw struck her in the head as she was driving.

Rabi’s killing generated outrage in Israel and internationally at the time, with diplomats from the US, UN and beyond decrying the attack and urging Israeli authorities to bring the perpetrators to justice.

Monday’s verdict comes amid an unprecedented wave of extremist settler violence against Palestinian civilians in the West Bank. Six Palestinians have been shot dead by settlers in March alone.

Although it was reported on Monday that the court had found the youth did commit at least some of the acts he was accused of in the indictment, it was not known which specific offenses those were, or whether he was found to have committed them as acts of terrorism.

Because the individual, a resident of the Benjamin region in the West Bank, was a 16-year old minor at the time, he is not technically convicted but rather found to have committed the crimes he is accused of.

The court issued its ruling on Monday in a 2-1 decision. A summary of the ruling, and not the full decision, was published on Tuesday because full details of rulings related to minors cannot be disclosed.

The summary of the ruling said the court “refuted the alibi claimed by the defendant,” “the lies of the defendant,” and the “contradictions in the later and more elaborate versions he gave,” during the criminal proceedings against him.

The court found that the rock killed Rabi and that the defendant’s DNA was found on the rock itself by investigators.

The two judges for the majority determined that arguments by the defense, that there was some hypothetical scenario in which the defendant’s DNA was “randomly and innocently” transferred to the rock, “is not reasonable and not supported by the evidence,” the summary said.

The court in its ruling ordered the young man be sent for review by the Youth Probation Service in order to proceed with arguments for sentencing.

Manslaughter as an act of terrorism is punishable by up to 25 years in prison, depending on the gravity of the incident.

Rabi was killed after the youth hurled a rock weighing two kilograms (five pounds) and measuring some 20 centimeters (eight inches) across at the windshield of her car as she traveled with her husband and daughter near the northern West Bank’s Tapuah Junction.

According to the indictment, the youth departed from the Pri Haaretz yeshiva in the settlement of Rehelim, where he studied, accompanied by several other students, on the evening of October 12, 2018.

The group arrived at a hilltop between the Rehelim Junction and the Tapuah Junction overlooking Route 60, the West Bank’s main north-south artery. The convicted youth then hurled the rock “out of an ideological motive of racism and hostility toward Arabs everywhere,” the indictment said.