The Central District Court in Lod sentenced a man on Wednesday to 13 years in prison for killing Palestinian mother Aysha Rabi in a rare conviction for Jewish nationalist terror relating to a 2018 attack, concluding the trial stage of an unusually long and closely contested case.
The court also ordered the defendant to pay Rabi’s family NIS 258,000, the maximum compensation available under the law, and imposed an additional suspended prison term.
The defendant, whose identity remains barred from publication because he was a minor at the time, was 15 years and 10 months old when he carried out the attack.
On October 12, 2018, he positioned himself with two or three unidentified people on an embankment overlooking Route 60 near the West Bank settlement of Rehelim, the court found.
After identifying an approaching car by its Palestinian license plate, he threw a rock weighing approximately 2 kilograms through its windshield. The rock struck Rabi directly in the head as she sat beside her husband, Yacoub, and in front of their nine-year-old daughter.
Rabi, a resident of the Palestinian town of Bidya and a mother of nine, died from her wounds. The court found that the defendant acted from a nationalist motive, intending to harm the car’s occupants and disregarding the possibility that they could be killed.
In March, judges Michal Barak-Nevo and Michael Tamir found that the defendant had committed the offenses, while then-presiding judge Liora Brody voted to acquit him, contending that the very high standard of proof beyond any reasonable doubt had not been met.
Because the defendant was a minor at the time, the juvenile court first determined that he had committed the offenses without immediately entering a formal conviction. It formally convicted him on Wednesday as part of the sentencing decision.
He was convicted of manslaughter in circumstances amounting to an act of terrorism, aggravated stone-throwing at a vehicle, and intentionally damaging a vehicle, with all three offenses classified as terrorism-related.
Defendant originally accused of manslaughter, not murder
At the time of the indictment, the fact that the minor was accused not of murder but of manslaughter, and the filing of the indictment was delayed by several weeks, indicated that the path to any kind of conviction might be difficult.
Adi Keidar – a lawyer for the right-wing legal aid group Honenu – told The Jerusalem Post at the time that even the DNA evidence could be attacked in court.
A spokesman for Honenu said that there was no other evidence connecting the minor to the incident, and that the DNA evidence was weak compared to standard DNA evidence, as it was found on a moving object – the rock – as opposed to on a stationary object, such as a wall.
Honenu said this meant that the DNA could have come from a variety of sources, while the rock may have been moved.
In addition, the spokesman said the DNA was of a low resolution. In other words, while high-resolution DNA evidence can flag a specific person, in this case the evidence could point to a number of people.
The majority of the court disagreed with these arguments, resting principally on the defendant’s DNA, which was found on the rock recovered from inside the family’s car, while also citing the rejection of his alibi, statements they found untruthful, contradictions in later accounts, and his problematic conduct during questioning.
In August 2024, the Post learned that as part of the prosecutor’s case, extensive evidence had been presented to debunk the defense’s attack on the DNA evidence.
Defendant continues to deny involvement in the attack
Further, the Post learned that the prosecution was able to use a May 2019 decision by the Lod District Court regarding various issues in the case as something of a road map toward conviction.
Already in that decision, the court had ruled, in the context of debates about how long to keep the minor in detention of some sort, that the prosecution’s chances of conviction were extremely high because of the DNA evidence.
Despite the defense’s arguments, the prosecution presented evidence that the chances of the minor defendant just happening to have touched the rock randomly (vs using it as his killing weapon) are minuscule, given that the only DNA on the rock is Rabi’s, her husband who touched the rock after it hit her, and the minor defendant’s.
In May 2019, the court called such a theory to try to acquit the defendant-minor “blatantly and grossly unreasonable.”
Moreover, the prosecution has taken aim at the defendant’s alibi.
According to the prosecution, the Post understands, the minor’s alibi was completely unreliable because he refused to open his mouth not only throughout the time of his arrest and being interrogated by the Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency) from December 30, 2018, but even from October 15, 2018, when he was interviewed only as a third-party witness and not yet as a suspect.
The fact that the defendant would not speak even when he was not yet suspected of anything, the prosecution argued, drew much greater attention to his potential guilt and drew greater scrutiny to his alibi.
In other words, were he not worried about any criminal charges, what would he have had to lose by telling law enforcement that he was in a different place from where he would have needed to be to perpetrate the crime?
The Post learned that the prosecution noted that the defendant only produced an alibi once he knew what the final narrative of the prosecution against him would take place as the indictment was about to be filed.
The defendant continues to deny any involvement in the attack, although the sentencing summary said he expressed sorrow over Rabi’s death.
His family and the Honenu legal-aid organization said they would appeal both the conviction and sentence to the Supreme Court.
His lawyers, Ariel Atari and Keidar, called the conviction wrongful and said Brody’s detailed dissent gave them a “high chance” of persuading the Supreme Court to overturn the majority ruling and acquit him.
The court said the defendant’s age was the central consideration in his favor.
It also gave significant weight to the rehabilitation process he had undergone during the seven years since the attack, including treatment, his decision to live in a different environment, and the positive impression he made on the probation service.
The judges nevertheless described the attack as cruel, stressing that Rabi was killed in front of her husband and young daughter and that the rock could also have killed the other occupants or caused the driver to lose control of the car.
They also found that its nationalist character made the offense more serious and that attacks of this kind risked increasing violence between Israelis and Palestinians in the West Bank.
Yacoub told the official responsible for preparing the family’s victim-impact report that justice, for him, would have meant his wife continuing to live with her family while the defendant pursued his own life and studied at university.
“No sum of money can compensate the Rabi family for the loss of her life,” the court said.
The Central District Attorney’s Office said, “The court sent a clear and unequivocal message today, reflecting the severity of the defendant’s actions and the grave and tragic outcome of the attack, which claimed Aysha Rabi’s life.”
“This was an act of terrorism carried out for nationalist reasons against Rabi, a Palestinian woman traveling with her family.”
Prosecutors said that despite the defendant’s age at the time, the seriousness of the attack led them to seek a lengthy prison term, a position the court accepted.
“In our view, today’s sentence reflects the severity of – and the danger posed by – nationalist acts of terrorism of this kind,” they stated.
This would not be the only such case of Jewish terrorists facing justice for violence against Palestinians, with the 2014 murderer of Palestinian minor Muhammad Abu Khadir, Yoseph Chaim Ben-David, and the 2015 murderer of the Palestinian Dawabsheh family, Amiram Ben-Uliel, both sentenced to life.
In fact, one of the reasons that the Rabi case probably took longer is that the Shin Bet declined to use enhanced interrogation on the minor defendant after the agency’s use of such techniques on Ben-Uliel almost led to a mistrial.
Elor Azariah, Ben Deri, and other IDF soldiers have also been given prison time for killing Palestinians.