The Lod District Court on Monday convicted Amiram Ben-Uliel of three counts of murder in a 2015 arson attack in the Arab village of Kfar Duma, which killed three members of the Dawabsha family, including a toddler.
The court ruled that Ben-Uliel, 25, a resident of the Shomron, hurled firebombs late into the Dawabsha home in July 2015 as the family slept, killing 18-month-old Ali Dawabsheh. His mother, Riham, and father, Saad, later died of their wounds. Ali’s 4-year-old brother Ahmad survived.
Ben-Uliel’s lawyers said they are appealing the verdict to the Supreme Court, explaining that the court had wrongfully accepted confessions extracted during torture.
“This is a dark day for the state of Israel,” Shmuel Zangi Meidad, director of the Honenu legal foundation and one of Ben-Uliel’s lawyers, said.
“This judgment is worthy of the third world and of regimes…of 100 years ago. Today an Israeli court lent a hand to convict a man whose innocence cries to the heavens.”
עמירם בן אוליאל הורשע ברצח שלושת בני משפחת דוואבשה@carmeldangor pic.twitter.com/dBHMexdypn
— כאן חדשות (@kann_news) May 18, 2020
“We believed that the State of Israel values human rights, that a citizen who’s been tortured in the harshest ways in the cellars of the Shin Bet until he was forced to confess for a crime he didn’t do would not be convicted on the basis of such admissions.”
Ben-Uliel’s wife Orian, yelled out during the verdict: “You put an innocent man in jail. The case is full of holes, you convicted an innocent man.”
“This trial won’t bring my family back,” Hussein Dawabsheh, the toddler’s grandfather, said outside the courtroom in central Israel. “But I don’t want another family to go through the trauma that I have.”
The attack was condemned across the Israeli political spectrum, and Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu pledged “zero tolerance” in the fight to bring the assailants to justice. Investigators placed several suspects under “administrative detention,” a measure typically reserved for Arab terrorists that allows authorities to hold suspects for months without charge.
“This was an attack with racist motives,” said prosecutor Yael Atzmon. “The court ruled it as a terrorist attack and this sends an important message that terror is terror and the identity of the perpetrators is irrelevant.”
Critics, however, noted that lesser non-deadly attacks, such as firebombings that damaged mosques and churches, had gone unpunished for years
Ben-Uliel was also convicted of two counts of attempted murder and one count of arson but was acquitted on the charge of belonging to a terrorist organization.
An accessory to the crime, a minor, signed a plea bargain with prosecutors admitting to conspiring with Ben-Uliel in planning the arson attack and to three counts of vandalism. The plea bargain deal was also criticized for being based on a confession extracted during torture.
(YWN Israel Desk – Jerusalem & AP)
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14 Responses
Disgusting. The Shabak caught a Jew as a scapegoat for Arab crime that they blamed on Jews, and extracted “confessions” under torture. No democratic country in the world would except confessions under torture.
Nice start , now lock up the rest of the hilltop youth and go from there
SHAME ON THE STATE OF ISRAEL. AN INNOCENT MAN IS CONVICTED ON THE BASIS OF A CONFESSION FORCED OUT OF HIM BY TORTURE. A VICTORY FOR THE ISRAELI GESTAPO.
Typical YWN article. Either trying to make all frum people look bad or just plain stupid articles, just like their crazy, hateful, and lowlife moderators.
STOP ACTING LIKE SCUMBAGS AND HIDING BEHIND A “YESHIVA WORLD” MASK AND FOOLING MOST OF YOUR AUDIENCE!
None of us know whether he’s innocent or guilty. The Shabak say that he reconstructed the crime showing knowledge that only the perpetrator could have had. But we have no way of knowing whether to trust them on this. They would certainly not hesitate to lie. The court also decided that 36 hours is enough to recover from torture to the point where a person would not make a false confession after that time. Again, how are we to know whether this is true? So while we certainly can’t conclude that since he was convicted he must be guilty, nor can we be sure he’s innocent. Maybe justice has been done after all. We should await the appeal and whatever evidence is produced to support it.
USA is not doing much better, having convicted Flynn also just based on a confession under duress, and now even with Justice Dept recanting, the evil wicked Democrat judge wants to force this case thru.
Common Seichel. Hilltop youth are idealistic youth who instead of going to nightclubs and doing drugs building up the country in harsh conditions while studying Torah and hearing the sheep. Most of them are new-Breslov. What you hear in the leftist news is false and does not represent the movement. Arabs often harass or even try to kill them, because they don’t have weapons (being kids and also without an official address) and sometimes fight back at Arabs to defend themselves.
commonsaychel: I live in Israel. A number of years ago, it was discovered that there was a family feud, including arsons between two Arab families, including the victim in this case. There was no evidence against any Jew. Arabs screamed and threatened, so a scapegoat was needed. Elazar Valk is 100% correct.
On a practical level, if the arson was done by an outsider, they would have picked a house near the entrance that would allow for an easy escape. The property in question was deep within the village. While I don’t know this particular village, most Arab villages have very narrow streets and navigating through them is not easy and quite dangerous.
Also, it is not advisable to wish anyone harm, especially a fellow Jew.
I guarantee HE won’t be released in any prisoner swap or for any reason. He will get worse treatment in jail than any Arab terrorist.
They’ll get a kid with the white Kippa and Peyot and just destroy him. He’ll never get out in a prisoner swap like arabs with the same charges. Can he even get a fair shot in the supreme whatever you call it? No way! Poor kid is toast!
He is innocent. Even if he did what they accuse him
He’s a martyr. Make no mistake about it, pc hacks
They should of had the car towed!
FSh, if he did it he’s guilty. Murder is murder, and the victims of this murder were not themselves murderers and did not deserve to die. And if, as the Sh”B claim, he knew things that only the murderer could know, then he did it.
The only substantial issue left is that we only have the Sh”B’s word for all this, and we cannot trust them. It has already happened many times that interrogators have fed a suspect information that they have then seized upon as evidence of his guilt.