Arab Israeli gets 17 years in prison over part in 2021 Acre mob assault

File: Mor Ganashvili, who was seriously injured during a lynching in Acre last year, arrives for a court hearing of one of his attackers at the Supreme Court in Jerusalem, May 17, 2023. (Yonatan Sindel/Flash90)
File: Mor Ganashvili, who was seriously injured during a lynching in Acre last year, arrives for a court hearing of one of his attackers at the Supreme Court in Jerusalem, May 17, 2023. (Yonatan Sindel/Flash90)

An Arab Israeli man is sentenced to 17 years behind bars for his role in the mob assault of a Jewish resident of Acre during the May 2021 riots that left the victim, Mor Ganashvili, with life-threatening and permanent injuries.

Qusay Abbas, 21 — who in July was convicted of attempted murder with a terror motive, in the most serious verdict yet among the nine individuals that are suspected of involvement in the attack — also gets a year of suspended sentence and is ordered to pay his victim NIS 180,000 ($48,000).

Ganashvili was beaten with iron bars and other blunt instruments that rendered him unconscious and left him with two brain hemorrhages and internal bleeding, among numerous other injuries.

According to Ynet, judges in the Haifa District Court wrote that “this incident is nothing short of a lynching, in which a group of rioters that included the defendant severely beat up Mor solely due to his being Jewish.”

Ganashvili, holding a large Israel flag, expresses satisfaction with the sentence, “which conveys the message that Jewish blood isn’t cheap.”

The riots in Acre were part of a series of violent inter-communal disturbances, particularly in mixed Jewish-Arab cities, that took place in the days following the outbreak of war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza in May 2021.

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