Hours after an Israeli army medic was convicted on Wednesday of manslaughter, for executing a wounded Palestinian suspect last year in the occupied West Bank city of Hebron, Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, called for the soldier to be pardoned. Netanyahu’s move completed a full retreat from his initial position. He had first expressed revulsion at the behavior of the medic, Elor Azaria, after viewing video of the incident published by an Israeli human rights group, B’Tselem. That graphic clip, recorded by a witness, showed that Azaria had fired a point-blank shot into the head of Abdel Fattah al-Sharif, a suspect in a knife attack at an army checkpoint who had already been subdued and was lying prone at his feet.

The prime minister began to back-track, however, when it became clear that a majority of the Israeli public considered the killing to be justified and a vocal minority called Azaria a hero. Sympathy for the killer has grown over the past nine months, even as his victim’s family has been forced to view the fatal shot again and again in news reports on the trial in a military court. Despite seeing the same images of the crime — and more video showing that no medical attention was offered to the suspect after he was immobilized by gunfire during the attack at one of the city’s many military checkpoints — polls found that most Israelis sympathize with Azaria.

67% of Israelis support a pardon for Azaria, poll conducted by @Channel2News pic.twitter.com/jBxQ34CDcL — Ruth Marks Eglash (@reglash) January 4, 2017

Poll: 70% of Israeli public favors pardon for soldier convicted of manslaughter @IsraelHayomEng — Mairav Zonszein (@MairavZ) January 5, 2017

(It is important to note that many polls conducted for the Israeli media, including one published the day after the verdict by Israel Hayom, a tabloid Sheldon Adelson set up to support Netanyahu, only survey Jewish Israelis. That poll, finding that 70 percent of respondents “believed Azaria should be pardoned immediately,” drew on “a random pool of 500 Jewish Hebrew-speaking Israelis over the age of 18.”) Israeli politicians, including Naftali Bennett, the far-right education minister, Shelly Yacimovich, a former leader of the Labour Party, and Miri Regev, the culture minister and a former spokeswoman for the Israeli army, have scrambled to channel the popular mood.

Jewish Home chair @naftalibennett says Elor Azaria must be pardoned "immediately, right now" — Raoul Wootliff (@RaoulWootliff) January 4, 2017

Former Labor leader MK @Syechimovich recommends a pardon for Elon Azaria because Israeli society is "stormy & explosive". — Jeremy Sharon (@jeremysharon) January 4, 2017

Israeli culture min & firebrand Miri Regev:"I will appeal for pardon for Elor Azaria. This isnt how you behave towards the people's soldier" — Noga Tarnopolsky (@NTarnopolsky) January 4, 2017

As Human Rights Watch reported this week, in the months before the shooting, senior Israeli officials, including the new defense minister, Avigdor Lieberman, and Jerusalem Police district commander, Moshe Edri, had argued that any Palestinian suspected of trying to stab an Israeli, even soldiers tasked with enforcing the occupation, should be subject to immediate execution. In addition to calls for clemency from politicians, demonstrations of support for Azaria came from hundreds of protesters who scuffled with the police outside the courtroom, waving nationalist banners and at least one Trump sign, and a group of his fellow army medics who dripped their own blood onto a placard claiming that the military’s justice system was “killing us from within.”

Elizabeth Tsurkov, a rights activist in Tel Aviv, noted that among the chants heard at the protest in favor of Azaria was one suggesting that the Israeli army chief of staff, Maj. Gen. Gadi Eisenkot, who defended the prosecution of the soldier in a speech this week, could suffer the same fate as Yitzhak Rabin, the prime minister who was assassinated in 1995 by an opponent of the Oslo Peace Accords.

Chants outside the military court: "Gadi [Eizenkot - IDF CoS] be careful, Rabin is looking for a friend" [you'll be assassinated too] — Elizabeth Tsurkov (@Elizrael) January 4, 2017