Security guard gets 6.5 years for molesting Palestinian women

Would repeatedly force himself on victims making their way to work in the early morning.

By ETGAR LEFKOVITS
security guard 88 (photo credit: )
security guard 88
(photo credit: )
A senior security guard in Ma'aleh Adumim who sexually molested Palestinian women caught trying to work in the settlement was sentenced Wednesday to six-and-a-half years in prison by the Jerusalem District Court. Oded Zecharia, an employee for a private security company that was hired by the Ma'aleh Adumim Municipality, had previously pleaded guilty in the same court as part of a plea bargain to committing indecent acts on and sodomizing several Palestinian women caught trying to illegally work in Ma'aleh Adumim. The security guard, who worked the night shift, would repeatedly force himself on Palestinian women caught making their way to the settlement for work in the early morning. The guard would entrap his victims by a forest on the edge of the settlement and would offer to let the young women work if they had oral sex with him, or if they would touch his sexual organ, according to court documents. In many cases in which the women refused, he used physical force, releasing them only after he satisfied himself sexually. "It seems that there is no and can be no argument that the actions of the accused are very severe," the judges wrote in their 12-page sentencing. The judges called the security guard's actions both "repulsive and revolting," which they said were made even more severe by the fact that they were not a one-time act, and since the accused was a security guard who "blemished the image of the State of Israel." The security guard was caught after police received multiple complaints from women, and police caught him red-handed forcing himself on a Palestinian woman sent by police to catch him in the act. The sentence handed down in the Jerusalem court was in tandem with the plea bargain reached whereby the state would not ask for more than eight years in jail.