20-year-old sentenced for attacks against Arab Israelis

The Beersheba Magistrate’s Court sentences 20-year-old Raz Amitzur to five-and-a-half years in prison for nationalistically motivated attacks he carried out against Arab Israelis last year.

As part of a plea bargain, Amitzur has been convicted of racially motivated offenses but not crimes under the Anti-Terrorism Law, with which he had initially been charged in the original indictment against him.

Among the crimes for which Amitzur was convicted was a stabbing attack in February 2017. Then, he approached a couple sitting in a parked car outside of a soccer stadium in Beersheba and asked the man inside for a lighter in an effort to confirm that he had an Arabic accent. Once he concluded that it was a Jewish-Muslim couple, he stabbed the man repeatedly. The victim was able to escape from the incident without serious injury.