State seeks 15-year sentence for teen scissors attacker
Palestinan girl, 17, whose 14-year-old cousin was shot dead as they carried out Jerusalem attack, said to confess to attempted murder
Sue Surkes is The Times of Israel's environment reporter
State prosecutors are demanding a 15-year-jail sentence for a Palestinian teenage girl who tried to stab passersby with scissors in central Jerusalem last November.
Nurhan Awad, now 17, was accompanied by her 14-year-old cousin, Hadil Awad, who was shot dead during the incident.
The prosecution secured Nurhan Awad’s agreement to a plea bargain, in which she has confessed to attempted murder.
However, the sides have been unable to agree on an appropriate punishment.
The girl’s lawyer, Mofiz Hajj, asked for leniency, saying she did not actually stab anyone and had expressed remorse.
Two people were lightly injured during the attack: a 70-year-old Palestinian resident of Bethlehem — mistaken by the girls for a Jew — who sustained stab wounds to his upper body, and a 27-year-old guard, who was lightly hurt by shrapnel from gunfire directed against the attackers.
The two Palestinian girls were caught on camera on Jaffa Road, near the Mahane Yehuda open-air vegetable market, as they lashed out at people with scissors.
A sapper who had been in the area got to the scene almost immediately and in less than a minute had disarmed both girls. He fired one bullet at Nurhan, wounding her, and then shot and killed Hadil.
Seeing Nurhan still moving out of the corner of his eye, the cop fired again, apparently to ascertain that she was no longer able to harm anyone.
In her interrogation, however, Nurhan told a different version of the incident, describing herself as a victim.
“She [Hadil] asked me to go with her to Jaffa Road,” the teenager told Israeli investigators. “I never intended to hurt anyone. Suddenly she pulled out the scissors and scratched someone. I didn’t understand what she was doing.
“People started yelling ‘Terrorist!’ and I was afraid they would attack me, so I whipped out the scissors to protect myself,” she recalled. “Suddenly I was shot and a man hit me with a chair and I was knocked out.”
Nurhan later lodged a formal complaint with police against the off-duty sapper who shot her.
Police officials at the time defended the sapper’s decision to shoot the girl more than once, saying that given the speed with which the incident unfolded and an element of surprise that rendered judgment difficult, the sapper had acted “according to regulations.”
It emerged after the incident that Hadil’s sister, Mahmoud Awad, had died in November 2013, aged 24 and eight months, after being shot in the neck by an IDF soldier at a Qalandiya checkpoint protest.
Times of Israel staff contributed to this report.
