Gan Shmuel terrorist rammer gets 25-year prison sentence

He both ran over and stabbed two soldiers and two civilians, one of whom was a 15-year-old girl, at Kibbutz Gan Shmuel near Hadera toward the start of the current wave of Arab violence.

By YONAH JEREMY BOB
Updated: AUGUST 6, 2017 14:08
Avichai Mandelblit (photo credit: MARC ISRAEL SELLEM/THE JERUSALEM POST)
Avichai Mandelblit
(photo credit: MARC ISRAEL SELLEM/THE JERUSALEM POST)
The Haifa District Court on Wednesday sentenced Israeli Alaa Ziad to 25 years in prison for four attempted murders following an October 11 car-ramming terrorist attack that he carried out. Ziad was convicted on March 10.
He both ran over and stabbed two soldiers and two civilians, one of whom was a 15-yearold girl, at Kibbutz Gan Shmuel near Hadera toward the start of the current wave of Arab violence.
This was the second time this week that Ziad was in the news after Interior Minister Arye Deri on Sunday filed a request with the Haifa District Court to revoke his citizenship over the attack.
The state filed Deri’s request after it was approved as legal by Attorney-General Avichai Mandelblit, a requirement under the law.
Adalah – The Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel attorney Sawsan Zaher and the Association for Civil Rights in Israel’s Oded Feller responded stating, “Even in the most grave case of murdering the prime minister, the High Court rejected a petition to revoke the citizenship of the murderer Yigal Amir in the name of defending the rights of a citizen.”
They added that since Amir’s citizenship was not revoked, it is clear that the proposed enforcement here is “arbitrary, humiliating and connected to foreign considerations,” and would never happen to a violent convicted Jew.
A central aspect of Deri’s case for revoking Zaid’s citizenship is that he “abused it to move freely” within Israel in order to perpetrate his terrorist attack.
A special committee for advising Deri on March 29 cited this abuse of citizenship to perpetrate the attack as well as that the car-ramming was a “manifest violation of faithfulness to the State of Israel” as factors that justified revoking his citizenship.