Haifa terrorist handed life sentence for killing man, wounding another

A terrorist who murdered an Israeli man and injured another during a 2017 shooting attack in Haifa was sentenced Tuesday to life in jail and an additional 22 years.

Judges said Arab Israeli Muhammad Shinawi shot Guy Kafri dead “purely due to his hatred of Jews,” who he said were “infidels whose lives are forfeit.”

They added that Shinawi, a 22-year-old Haifa resident, had shown no regret for his actions during the trial.

The terrorist was ordered to pay NIS 258,000 ($70,000) to Kafri’s family, as well as NIS 120,000 ($33,000) to the man he wounded, Yehiel Iluz.

Iluz, 48, a senior judge on a Haifa rabbinic conversion court, was moderately wounded at 9:30 a.m. on January 3, 2017, in the first shooting on the city’s Haatzma’ut Road. A few minutes later, Shinawi opened fire at a Jewish woman, but missed. And a few minutes after that, Guy Kafri, 47, a van driver from Haifa’s Nesher neighborhood, was shot and killed on the nearby Hagiborim Street.

Shinawi fled after the attack but eventually turned himself in to authorities and confessed. He told investigators he carried out the killing after his girlfriend called him a “Zionist Jew” and a “Jew lover.”

According to the Shin Bet security service, before the attacks, Shinawi adopted more radical Islamic beliefs, considering Jews to be “unbelievers whose judgment is death.”

Two other men — Khaled bin Atef Abu Kleib, 21, and Ihab bin Ayoub Yusef‬, 20 — were charged alongside Shinawi as accessories after the fact.

Shahar Dror, brother-in-law of the deceased, said in his eulogy that Kafri was killed solely because he was a Jew. “He was a good man who helped everyone,” Dror told Channel 2 immediately after the attack.

Iluz is a father of seven from the Galilee town of Migdal Ha’emek.

Judah Ari Gross contributed to this report.