Palestinian indicted for hit-and-run, not terror, in death of Israeli woman

A Palestinian man who killed an Israeli woman when he hit her with his car on a West Bank road was indicted Wednesday for a hit-and-run, ruling out speculations of a terror motive in the incident.

The death of Hava Roizen last month was initially reported as a possible car-ramming attack, though police said at the time that it was more likely to have been an accident.

The indictment against Kamal Kadari, 60, was filed at the IDF’s Samaria Military Court, charging him with negligent homicide and abandoning the scene of an accident, the Kan public radio broadcaster reported.

Kadari, who turned himself in to the Palestinian Authority police after the incident, remains in PA custody.

The charges were based on a police assessment of the incident that found that Roizen had crossed the road at a point where there was no crosswalk.

Kadari, who had five passengers in his car at the time, did not notice the Israeli woman in the road, the report said.

Roizen was struck by the vehicle on Route 60, near the Havat Gilad outpost in the northern West Bank. She was declared dead by the Magen David Adom ambulance service after paramedics were unable to resuscitate her.

Kadari fled the scene and was later spotted near the Palestinian village of Jit, where he gave himself up to PA police.

A senior PA official told The Times of Israel last month that Kadari insisted what happened had been an accident and not an attack. The official added that he would remain in the custody of the PA police and would be dealt with by the PA judicial system.

Israeli authorities file charges against Palestinians accused of harming Israelis even if the suspects are still in PA police custody.

Roizen was a resident of the small ultra-Orthodox settlement of Emmanuel. An immigrant from the former Soviet Union, Roizen worked as a photographer, frequently hitchhiking around the country to events, an Emmanuel resident told The Times of Israel.

A destroyed olive tree near the northern West Bank village of Burin (Courtesy Yesh Din)

Since the August 16 incident there has been a spate of attacks on Palestinian property and homes in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.

According to B’Tselem, hours after Roizen was run down Israelis hurled stones at several Palestinian vehicles near the Yitzhar settlement and torched a tractor in the nearby village of Urif.

On August 17, Palestinians in the nearby West Bank villages of Arraba and Luban a-Sharqiya woke up to find some 370 olive trees in their lands uprooted, B’Tselem said.

A similar crime was reported on August 18 in Ras Karkar near Ramallah, according to B’Tselem, where 74 olive trees were cut down, a water well was damaged, and Hebrew hate slogans were found at the scene. In another suspected retaliatory hate crime, the tires of 15 vehicles were punctured in an East Jerusalem neighborhood, an NGO based in the city said.

Jacob Magid contributed to this report.