Palestinian teenage protest icon Ahed Tamimi on Wednesday was sentenced to eight months in prison for slapping and kicking a pair of Israeli soldiers outside her West Bank home, capping a case that sparked uproar in Israel, turned the 17-year-old girl into a Palestinian hero and attracted international attention.
Tamimi’s Israeli lawyer, Gaby Lasky, said Tamimi agreed to the sentence as part of a plea deal with prosecutors that allowed her to avoid more serious charges that could have imprisoned her for years.
Under the deal, she is due to be released in the summer. She is also being fined the equivalent of about US$1,400.
Photo: AFP
Lasky called the legal proceedings a “farce.”
“They are trying to deter other Palestinian youth from resisting occupation as Ahed did,” she said.
The judge agreed to a similar plea deal for Tamimi’s mother, Nariman, who has been charged with incitement.
“This is injustice, this court is designed to oppress the Palestinians,” her father Bassem said.
He said they agreed to the deal because they had been threatened with three years in jail.
Bassem had visited his daughter and wife for the first time in prison the day before.
He said Ahed spends her time doing school work.
An Israeli supporter of Ahed Tamimi slapped a prosecutor after the ruling and was later arrested by police.
Ahed Tamimi was arrested in December last year after video surfaced of her kicking the soldiers outside her West Bank home.
While some praised the soldiers for showing restraint, hardline politicians criticized what they felt was a weak response and called for tough action against the girl, whose family has a long history of run-ins with the Israelis.
However, the full-throttle prosecution of Ahed Tamimi, who turned 17 behind bars, has drawn widespread international criticism.
An Israeli official’s revelation that he had once had parliament investigate whether the blond, blue-eyed Tamimis are “real” Palestinians drew accusations of racism and helped stoke additional interest in the case.
The case touches on what constitutes legitimate resistance to Israel’s rule over millions of Palestinians, now in its 51st year, in territories it captured in the 1967 war.
“No justice under occupation and we are in an illegal court,” Ahed Tamimi said to reporters in court.
Her supporters see a brave girl who struck the soldiers in anger after having just learned that Israeli troops seriously wounded a 15-year-old cousin, shooting him in the head from close range with a rubber bullet during nearby stone-throwing clashes.
In Israel, she is seen either as a naive youth manipulated by her elders or a threat to Israel’s military deterrence. The incident also sparked debate about the soldiers’ refusal to act.
Israel has treated her actions as a criminal offense, indicting her on charges of assault and incitement that carry up to 14 years in prison.
Since 2009, residents of the Tamimis’ village of Nabi Salah have staged regular protests against occupation that often end with stone-throwing clashes.
Ahed Tamimi has participated in such marches from a young age and has had several highly publicized run-ins with soldiers.
One photograph shows the then-12-year-old raising a clenched fist toward a soldier towering over her.
Following her latest arrest, images of the girl became popular on posters in the West Bank. About 1.7 million people worldwide have signed a petition calling for her release.
The case has drawn attention to Israel’s military court system, which is used to try Palestinians in the West Bank. Israeli West Bank settlers are tried under Israeli civilian courts.
The dueling justice systems have drawn criticism from international rights groups.
The military courts have a near 100 percent conviction rate, in part because so many Palestinians agree to plea bargains.
Critics say the system gives Palestinians few rights and they are often coerced into plea deals. Hundreds of Palestinian minors are processed by the military court system each year.
“Ahed will be home in a few months, but Israel is putting this child behind bars for eight months for calling for protests and slapping a soldier, after threatening her with years in jail,” Human Rights Watch Middle East director Sarah Leah Whitson said.
Republican US lawmakers on Friday criticized US President Joe Biden’s administration after sanctioned Chinese telecoms equipment giant Huawei unveiled a laptop this week powered by an Intel artificial intelligence (AI) chip. The US placed Huawei on a trade restriction list in 2019 for contravening Iran sanctions, part of a broader effort to hobble Beijing’s technological advances. Placement on the list means the company’s suppliers have to seek a special, difficult-to-obtain license before shipping to it. One such license, issued by then-US president Donald Trump’s administration, has allowed Intel to ship central processors to Huawei for use in laptops since 2020. China hardliners
A top Vietnamese property tycoon was on Thursday sentenced to death in one of the biggest corruption cases in history, with an estimated US$27 billion in damages. A panel of three hand-picked jurors and two judges rejected all defense arguments by Truong My Lan, chair of major developer Van Thinh Phat, who was found guilty of swindling cash from Saigon Commercial Bank (SCB) over a decade. “The defendant’s actions ... eroded people’s trust in the leadership of the [Communist] Party and state,” read the verdict at the trial in Ho Chi Minh City. After the five-week trial, 85 others were also sentenced on
Conjoined twins Lori and George Schappell, who pursued separate careers, interests and relationships during lives that defied medical expectations, died this month in Pennsylvania, funeral home officials said. They were 62. The twins, listed by Guinness World Records as the oldest living conjoined twins, died on April 7 at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, obituaries posted by Leibensperger Funeral Homes of Hamburg said. The cause of death was not detailed. “When we were born, the doctors didn’t think we’d make 30, but we proved them wrong,” Lori said in an interview when they turned 50, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported. The
RAMPAGE: A Palestinian man was left dead after dozens of Israeli settlers searching for a missing 14-year-old boy stormed a village in the Israeli-occupied West Bank US President Joe Biden on Friday said he expected Iran to attack Israel “sooner, rather than later” and warned Tehran not to proceed. Asked by reporters about his message to Iran, Biden simply said: “Don’t,” underscoring Washington’s commitment to defend Israel. “We are devoted to the defense of Israel. We will support Israel. We will help defend Israel and Iran will not succeed,” he said. Biden said he would not divulge secure information, but said his expectation was that an attack could come “sooner, rather than later.” Israel braced on Friday for an attack by Iran or its proxies as warnings grew of