An Israeli military medic who was filmed killing an incapacitated Palestinian attacker last year has been sentenced to 18 months in prison.
Elor Azaria’s sentence was handed down by a panel of three judges sitting in a military court in Tel Aviv. Prosecutors had demanded a sentence of between three and five years, while Azaria had asked the court to be “merciful” and sentence him to open detention.
Human rights groups argued that the sentence was too lenient, while Azaria’s supporters, including some ministers, said he should not have been sentenced to prison at all.
On 24 March last year, Azaria, 21, killed Abdul Fatah al-Sharif in a shooting near a checkpoint in the West Bank city of Hebron that was captured on video by a Palestinian human rights activist. Sharif, who was immobile, had already been shot and badly injured during a knife attack on Israeli soldiers.
The presiding judge, Maya Heller, said the panel had found that Azaria’s actions had seriously harmed the values of Israeli society as a whole, as well as violating the “purity of arms” of the Israeli military’s ethical code.
The court said Azaria had not expressed regret for his crime, though it noted that his army record had been unblemished up until the shooting and that his arrest had caused his family deep distress.
Azaria was convicted of manslaughter last month at the end of a trial that exposed deep divisions in Israel, where military service is compulsory and support for young soldiers is widespread. The case was seen as a test of Israeli military justice, and the guilty verdict interpreted as a victory for commanders seeking to preserve a code of ethics.
Intense interest in the case was fuelled in part by the scarcity of prosecutions against Israeli service personnel accused of committing violence against Palestinians.
Sharif’s family criticised the length of the sentence.
“We are not surprised, from the onset we knew this was a show trial that will not do us justice,” they said in a statement. “Even though the soldier was caught on video and it is clear that this is a cold-blooded execution, he was convicted only of manslaughter, not murder, and the prosecution asked for only a light sentence of three years. The sentence he received is less than a Palestinian child gets for throwing stones.”
Azaria’s legal team asked for the start of the sentence to be postponed until an appeal could be heard. After the sentence was read out, his family and supporters sang the Israeli national anthem and referred to him as a hero.
A number of prominent Israeli politicians have called for Azaria to be pardoned, including the prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and the education minister and far-right Jewish Home leader, Naftali Bennett, who has previously described the trial as politically “contaminated from the beginning”.
The culture minister, Miri Regev, insisted on Tuesday that Azaria “should not sit a single day in prison”.
The discussion at the heart of the case was whether Azaria was justified in killing Sharif; judges ruled last month he had acted unlawfully.
Prosecutors argued Azaria’s motive was expressed in comments overheard by witnesses: that Sharif “deserved to die” for wounding a comrade. The court accepted this account, noting in its ruling that the words carried “serious significance”.
Human Rights Watch said: “Sending Elor Azaria to prison for his crime sends an important message about reining-in excessive use of force.
“But senior Israeli officials should also repudiate the shoot-to-kill rhetoric that too many of them have promoted, even when there is no imminent threat of death. Pardoning Azaria or reducing his punishment would only encourage impunity for unlawfully taking the life of another person.”
The length of the sentence was criticised by Adalah, the legal centre for Arab minority rights in Israel, which said it reflected “the impunity enjoyed by Israeli security personnel accused of crimes against Palestinians”.
