A young Israeli soldier has been convicted of manslaughter for killing a wounded Palestinian but the verdict in the deeply divisive military trial sparked immediate calls from Right-wing politicians for the killer to be pardoned.

Sergeant Elor Azaria, 20, was found guilty in a courtroom inside the Israeli defence ministry in Tel Aviv as an angry crowd protested his innocence and scuffled with police on the streets outside.

The case is a rare example of Israel’s military convicting one of its own troops in a killing. The last manslaughter conviction was for a sniper who shot dead a British civilian activist in 2003.

Sgt Azaria was arrested in March after video emerged of him shooting a wounded Palestinian man as he lay bleeding in the street in Hebron, a flashpoint city in the occupied West Bank.

The Palestinian, 21-year-old Abdul Fatah al-Sharif, had stabbed an Israeli soldier moments before and had been shot but not killed by other Israeli troops. The mobile phone footage shows Sgt Azaria calmly cocking his rifle and firing once into the man’s head.