A military court in Ofer Camp, Judea, on Monday sentenced the terrorist who stabbed Nirit Zmora in the back. Zmora was present at the sentencing: 14 years in prison and half a million shekel ($138,000) in damages to the victim. The terrorist, Hamza Faiz, sat and smiled during the reading of his sentence.
Attorney Haim Bleicher of the Honenu legal aid society, who’s been accompanying the family through the ordeal, said in a statement: “Just to see the terrorist’s smile when he heard how many years of actual imprisonment he received made you understand the magnitude of the court’s failure and the lack of deterrence.”
The military court acquitted the terrorist of attempted murder, convicting him only of causing injury, since the knife was broken during the stabbing, which, according to the judges, made it impossible to prove that the terrorist’s intention was to murder.
Mind you, in the attack, Hamza Faiz ran up to his victim with a knife and stabbed her in the back, while shouting “Allahu Akbar,” following which action Nirit Zmora was severely injured. But that was not good enough for the judges of the military court, Lt. Col. Zvi Heilbron, Lt. Col. Eti Adar and Major Haim Balilty, who convicted Hamza of the offense of possessing a knife, and ruled that it would be impossible to determine that he had stabbed Zmora in order to kill her.
“This is a case of a single stab,” the judges ruled, explaining that “only in rare cases, have courts convicted defendants of murder or attempted murder for one knife stab, even if it resulted in the death of the victim. The reason for this lies in the difficulty of determining the existence of an intent to kill when just one stabbing is involved.”
The court noted: “Because of the breaking of the knife’s butt, the defendant was unable to repeatedly stab the complainant more times.”
The court also referred to the location of the stabbing and claimed that the fact that the stab was in the back rather than in the chest raises doubt as to whether the attacker wanted to cause Zmora’s death.
In conclusion, the judges wrote: “Even when a stabbing offense is committed with a nationalistic motive, it is necessary to prove the existence of an intent to kill, and when it is doubtful that we are dealing with an intent to kill or intentionally cause harm, this acts in the defendant’s favor.”
This, ladies and gentlemen, is what passes for justice in IDF court rooms. Perhaps what Israel needs most desperately these days is an army.
In the course of the proceeding, Attorney Bleicher submitted a calculation of the damage caused by the terrorist to Zmora, in the amount of 5 million shekel ($1,380,000). She’ll have to contend with 10% of that – if she can ever collect.