Israeli sentenced to 13 years for killing Aisha Rabi with a thrown stone

An Israeli has been sentenced to 13 years in prison for the killing of Aisha Rabi, a Palestinian woman who died after a stone was thrown at the car she was travelling in in the West Bank in 2018. Ynet reported that the defendant was 15 years old at the time, that the court found he acted from a nationalist motive, and that he threw the stone towards the vehicle in which Rabi was riding with her husband and their daughter. She was killed by the impact of the stone.

Haaretz reported that Rabi was 47 and a resident of Biddya, and that she was killed near the Israeli settlement of Rehelim, in the northern West Bank, when the stone was thrown at the car by an Israeli settler. Ynet reported that the defendant denied carrying out the act, and that the court found he had gone through a process of rehabilitation over the years since.

Who Aisha Rabi was, and where this happened

Rabi lived in Biddya, a Palestinian town in the northern West Bank. Rehelim, named by Haaretz as the area where the killing took place, is an Israeli settlement in the same part of the territory. The road network of the northern West Bank is used by both Palestinian residents and Israeli settlers, and stone throwing at passing vehicles, in both directions, has been a recurring form of violence there for decades.

The reports differ on one detail of Rabi's family. Haaretz described her as a mother of nine. A statement issued by the Tag Meir forum, quoted by N12, referred to the wounds of eight of the couple's children. The reports do not explain the discrepancy, and we are not resolving it here.

Why the defendant's age matters

Ynet reported that the defendant was 15 when the stone was thrown, which in Israeli law makes him a minor at the time of the offence. Israeli criminal law treats offences committed by minors differently from those committed by adults: rehabilitation is a factor courts weigh in sentencing, and Ynet reported that the court found he had undergone such a process in the years since the killing. Israeli courts also routinely restrict the publication of identifying details of defendants who were minors when an offence was committed, and none of the reports name him.

The gap between the killing in 2018 and the sentence reported now covers a long legal process. The reports summarised here do not set out its stages.

What a nationalist motive means in an Israeli verdict

Ynet reported that the court found the stone was thrown from a nationalist motive. In Israeli legal and official language, a nationalist motive is the classification used for violence driven by the national or ethnic identity of the victim rather than by a personal dispute, and it is the finding that places an offence in the category of ideologically driven crime. The Ynet news alert channel described the case in the same terms, saying the sentence was handed down over a killing carried out on nationalist grounds while the defendant was a minor.

The response from Tag Meir

Tag Meir is an Israeli civil society forum of organisations that campaigns against nationalist and racist violence and provides support to victims and their families. N12 reported that the forum, which it said has accompanied the Rabi family since the killing, welcomed the sentence. "Terror is terror," the statement said, adding that "no punishment will return his wife to Yaakov Rabi, nor heal the wounds of their eight children," and describing the recognition of the act as nationalist terror as a necessary step.

What the reports do not say

The material does not name the court that passed the sentence or the city where it sits, and it does not state the offence he was convicted of or the date of the conviction. It does not say whether the defendant intends to appeal, or whether the prosecution sought a longer term. It does not give the date in 2018 on which Rabi was killed, and it does not detail how long he has already spent in custody or whether that time counts towards the 13 years. The reports also do not describe the evidence on which the court based its finding of a nationalist motive, and Ynet's statement that he denied the act is not accompanied by any further account from the defence. Beyond the reference to a rehabilitation process, the reports give no detail of what that process involved.