An Israeli court handed a Jewish settler three life sentences on Monday for murdering a Palestinian toddler and his parents in an arson attack on their home in the occupied West Bank.
Amiram Ben-Uliel, 25, was sentenced by the Lod court following his conviction in May for the 2015 killings. He was also found guilty of two counts each of attempted murder and arson, along with conspiracy to commit a hate crime.
The arson attack killed 18-month-old Ali Dawabsheh. His mother, Riham, and father, Saad, later died of their wounds. Ali’s four-year-old brother Ahmad survived with burns on his body.
The court said Ben-Uliel’s “actions were meticulously planned and stemmed from the radical ideology he held and racism”. It said the punishment was “close to the maximum penalty prescribed by the law”.
The Dawabsheh family said no prison sentence could atone for the crime.
“What will the court’s decision give me? What will it give to Ahmad?” the child’s grandfather, Hussein Dawabsheh, told reporters outside the courtroom on Monday. “It won’t return anything to him.”
‘Revenge’
The 2015 arson attack came amid a wave of vigilante attacks on West Bank Palestinians by Jewish settlers.
Ben-Uliel had sought to avenge the killing of an Israeli a month earlier. He chose the Dawabsheh family home and another dwelling in Duma village, near Nablus, on the assumption they were inhabited and, before firebombing them, spray-painted “Revenge” and “Long Live King Messiah” on their walls.
Israeli settler sentencing for arson ‘won’t bring my family back’
Ben-Uliel was acquitted of a charge of belonging to a “terrorist” organisation.
He first threw a Molotov cocktail through the window of a house whose inhabitants were not at home.
He then proceeded to the Dawabsheh house and threw a second petrol bomb through the bedroom window where the couple and their two children were sleeping, before fleeing.