Hussein Abu Khdeir calls on Israel to destroy homes of murderers

Hussein Abu Khdeir demands that the homes of the minors convicted in the brutal 2014 murder of his son, Muhammed Abu Khdeir, be demolished.

“We do not accept the [court’s] verdict for the minor, and we will appeal to the Supreme Court,” he says following the Jerusalem District Court’s decision to hand down a life sentence to one of the minor convicted in the kidnapping and murdering the Palestinian teenager. A second minor received 21 years for the grisly 2014 revenge attack.

“The court must order that the home be demolished; anything less is not enough. When a 14-year-old murders a Jew he receives a life sentence. If there is no apartheid and no racism they should also give him a life sentence and demolish his home.”

A life sentence for a minor is nearly unprecedented.

Another man, Yosef Haim Ben-David, 31, was also convicted in the attack, but has not yet been sentenced while the court considers his claim that he suffers from a mental illness and was not responsible for his actions at the time. The names of the two have not been released for publication because they are minors.

Both were also fined NIS 30,000 by the court for the 2014 attack, in which the three kidnapped Abu Khdeir and then beat him and burned him alive in a nearby forest.

Abu Khdeir was abducted and killed on July 1, 2014, two days after it emerged that three Israeli teens who had been abducted three weeks earlier in the West Bank had been killed by their Palestinian kidnappers shortly after their disappearance.

The violence was a major contributing factor in the breakout of a war with Gaza war that followed a week later.