Rabbi Moshe Levinger, militant leader of the Jewish settlement movement in Hebron, was sentenced by a Jerusalem District Court on Tuesday to five months in prison for negligently causing the death of a Palestinian shopkeeper 18 months ago.
He received an additional seven-month suspended sentence. The prosecutor had asked a minimum one-year term for the rabbi.
The sentence was the result of a plea bargain, in which Levinger admitted he had negligently fired his rifle in downtown Hebron, killing the shopkeeper and wounding a passerby.
Originally, he pleaded not guilty, claiming he was surrounded by stone-throwing Arabs and had fired into the air to frighten them off.
The prosecutor charged him with manslaughter, which carries a maximum 20-year prison term, but withdrew the charge.
Judge Shalom Brenner ruled Levinger had acted “hastily” and “uncontrolled” when he fired the fatal shot, and was not under attack from the direction in which he fired.
The judge rejected an appeal to allow Levinger to do public service in lieu of jail, but gave the rabbi a two-week reprieve before he starts serving his time.
Meanwhile, the Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories, known as B’tselem, reported Tuesday that nine Palestinians were killed by Israeli security forces last month.
Three were shot in the West Bank and six in the Gaza Strip.
Another Palestinian died by falling from a roof while being chased by security forces, and an 11th was apparently killed by a collaborator.
According to B’tselem, four of the dead were children, one of them 11 and the others between 13 and 16.
The organization, whose data has proven reliable, stressed that while Palestinian casualties in clashes with security forces have decreased, the fact that dozens were killed in recent months and hundreds wounded, “among them many children,” was unacceptable.
According to B’tselem, 646 Palestinians were killed by security forces from December 1987, when the Palestinian uprising began, through April 1990. About 146 were children 16 and younger.
In the same period, 10 Israel Defense Force soldiers and nine civilians, three of them children, were killed by Palestinians, B’tselem said.
Eight Palestinians were murdered last month, apparently because they were suspected of collaborating with the Israeli authorities.
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