Court rules Yosef Haim Ben David not insane and therefore fully responsible for actions in killing Mohammed Abu Khdeir

This article is more than 4 years old

This article is more than 4 years old

The Israeli ringleader in the beating and burning alive of a Palestinian teenager in 2014 has been convicted of his murder.



Yosef Haim Ben David, 31, was found in November to have led the assault, but a verdict was delayed after his lawyers submitted last-minute documents saying he suffered from mental illness.

The court ruling on Tuesday said that Ben David “was not psychotic, fully understood the facts, was responsible for his actions, had no difficulty in understanding reality and had the capacity to prevent the crime”.

A sentencing hearing has been set for 3 May.

The family of the teenager, Mohammed Abu Khdeir, welcomed the decision but said they hoped judges followed through with a life sentence for Ben David.

At the hearing Mohammed’s mother wore a heart-shaped pendant containing an image of her son wearing a baseball cap, and his father said the decision “should have been made a long time ago”.

“We knew that he wasn’t mad,” Hussein Abu Khdeir told Agence France-Presse. “It was all a big lie to get off from the crime which he carried out. Even if they sentence him for life, this will never bring Mohammed back again. Our hearts are wounded from what happened.”

In February, a court sentenced Ben David’s two young Israeli accomplices to life and 21 years in prison for the killing, which was part of a spiral of violence in the run-up to the 2014 Gaza war.

The two were minors at the time of the attack, in which they snatched Mohammed, 16, from an east Jerusalem street and killed him.

His murder was seen as revenge for the killing of Israeli teenagers Naftali Frenkel, Gilad Shaer and Eyal Yifrah, who were abducted from a hitchhiking stop near the flashpoint West Bank city of Hebron. Israeli authorities said the suspects had decided to kill an Arab and equipped themselves with cables, petrol and other materials before randomly choosing Mohammed.

“Today’s decision has come late, but it is correct,” Mohannad Jbara, a lawyer for Mohammed’s family, told AFP. “The crime occurred a year and nine months ago, so this decision has taken a long time, but we have succeeded in convincing the court that he was faking.”

Mohammed was kidnapped from Israeli-annexed east Jerusalem on 2 July 2014 and beaten, and his burnt body was found hours later in a forest in the western part of the city. A forensic report showed smoke in his lungs, indicating he was alive when set alight.