Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Breaking News

Convictions Upheld For 3 Extremist Jews Who Burned Palestinian Teen Alive

JERUSALEM (JTA) — Israel’s Supreme Court upheld the convictions of three Jewish extremists convicted of burning a Palestinian teen alive in a revenge killing.

The court on Thursday upheld life sentences for two of the killers, one a minor at the time of the murder, and a 21-year prison term for the other minor involved in the killing.

The three kidnapped Muhammad Abu Khdeir, 16, from eastern Jerusalem, then beat and burned him alive in a forest outside of the city on July 1, 2014, soon after the bodies of three Jewish teens kidnapped and murdered by the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas were found in a shallow grave near Hebron in the West Bank more than two weeks after they went missing from a hitchhiking stand near Alon Shvut in the Etzion bloc of settlements.

At the time of his conviction, the Jerusalem District Court determined that Yosef Ben-David, now 33, was mentally fit to be sentenced, rejecting his insanity plea that he should not be held responsible for his actions at the time of the kidnapping and murder because of a history of mental illness. He was sentenced in May 2016.

“All three made a decision to cause death while committing the act, in a spontaneous partnership,” the judges wrote. “The acts they carried out have turned into the Abu Khdeir affair, and exceeded the boundaries of a regular criminal case. The murder calls for profound self-examination from top to bottom in Israeli society as to dealing with the phenomenon of racism and its metastases.”

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.

If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.

Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism. 

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.