Israeli convicted of burning Palestinian teen to death

An Israeli man was convicted on Tuesday of murdering a Palestinian teenager in Jerusalem, as a court rejected his insanity plea for a crime that helped trigger the 2014 Gaza war.

Prosecutors said Yosef Haim Ben-David organised the killing of 16-year-old Mohammed Abu Khudair, who was bludgeoned, strangled and burned alive. Two Jewish youths who helped him abduct the teen were sentenced in February, one to life imprisonment and the other to a 21-year term.

All three defendants had confessed and said the July 2, 2014, murder was revenge for the killing days earlier of three Israeli youths by the Hamas Islamist group in the occupied West Bank.

Ben-David, 30, lodged an insanity plea that held up his formal conviction and sentencing.

After receiving psychological assessments, the court ruled that at the time he had committed the offence he was “not psychotic, fully understood the facts, was responsible for his actions, had no difficulty in understanding reality and had the capacity to prevent the crime”.

He will be sentenced on May 3.

Abu Khudair’s killing raised tensions, and a seven-week Israeli offensive against the Hamas-run Gaza Strip began on July 8, 2014, after cross-border Palestinian rocket attacks and an Israeli roundup of suspected militants in the West Bank.

(FRANCE 24 with REUTERS)