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Palestinian outrage as soldier gets off lightly
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A YOUNG Israeli soldier who killed a wounded and incapacitated Palestinian assailant was sentenced to 18 months’ imprisonment yesterday, in a show of leniency that drew Palestinian outrage after one of the most divisive trials in Israel’s history.
Eleven months ago, Sergeant Elor Azaria was serving as an army medic in the town of Hebron in the occupied West Bank when two Palestinians stabbed and wounded another soldier.
One of the assailants was shot dead by troops. The other was shot and wounded. Eleven minutes later, as the wounded man, Abd Elfatah Ashareef, 21, lay on the ground unable to move, Azaria, then 19, put a bullet in his head with a rifle.
With the 50th anniversary of Israel’s wartime capture of the West Bank approaching, the trial generated debate about whether the military, in accusing Azaria of violating open-fire rules and its ethical code, was out of touch with a public that has shifted to the right in its attitudes towards the Palestinians.
A three-judge military court convicted Azaria of manslaughter last month, a crime that carries a maximum 20-year term. Prosecutors had asked for a three-to-five-year sentence.
Passing an 18-month sentence, the court said Azaria had “taken upon himself to be both judge and executioner” and had not expressed regret for his crime. But it said it was passing a lighter sentence partly because it had been Azaria’s first combat experience.
“They are laughing at us,” Ashareef’s father Yusri reacted to the sentence.
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