Two of three Israelis convicted of murdering a Palestinian teen in 2014 — a death that prosecutors say was revenge for the deaths of three Israelis days earlier — were sentenced to prison Thursday.
A Jerusalem district court sentenced one Israeli teen to life in prison and another to 21 years for the killing of 16-year-old Mohammed Abu Khdeir, court representative Shirley Koren said.
Abu Khdeir’s death — he was kidnapped in the Jerusalem area, beaten and burned alive — was one of the events that stoked high tensions between Israelis and Palestinians in the summer of that year.
Prosecutors and Abu Khdeir’s parents had asked that both Israeli teens be sentenced to life.
A court had found the Israeli teens and a third Israeli — an adult named Yosef Haim Ben-David — responsible for Abu Khdeir’s murder in November. But the judgment of Ben-David is suspended, pending a future ruling on his claim that he was insane.
Israeli authorities have not released the names of the convicted Israeli teenagers.
Abu Khdeir was abducted near his home in east Jerusalem in July 2014. His charred body was later found in a forest.
Days earlier, three Israeli teenagers were found dead in a field in the West Bank — deaths that Israel blamed on the Palestinian militant group Hamas.
Authorities have said Abu Khdeir was killed in retaliation. Abu Khdeir’s death sparked weeks of angry protests by Palestinians.
The victim’s father, Hussein Abu Khdeir, said he and his wife attended a January hearing to ask that their son’s killers be sentenced to life in prison.
His wife, he said, “was crying the entire time because the murderers of her son were sitting in court.”
“I told the judge that you need to give the maximum punishment for these murderers and not to be lenient with them,” he told CNN last month.
“My wife and I are having nightmares in the middle of the night when we think about what has happened to our son,” he added. “We are not stable and very emotional about the entire thing.”
