In the early hours of July 13, 2015, several masked individuals descended on the Palestinian village of Duma in the northern West Bank. They approached a house in which the Dawabsheh family was fast asleep, smashed several of the house’s windows, and threw in firebombs, causing it to go up in flames. A neighbor later said that he heard the family’s screams. One-year-old Ali Dawabsheh was killed in the fire; his parents Sa’ed and Riham, 32 and 27, died of their wounds weeks later. Four-year-old Ahmed, now an orphan, suffered wounds over 60% of his body.
Five months later, in December 2015, Israeli authorities announced that they had arrested several Jewish suspects in connection with the attack. On January 3, 2016, two individuals were indicted. Amiram Ben-Uliel, 21, was charged with murder, while a minor whose name was withheld was charged as an accessory.
“I know Amiram is innocent… He is a holy, righteous man, really”
MK Limor Son Har-Melech, Otzma Yehudit
During the investigation, Ben-Uliel confessed on multiple occasions and reenacted the attack. His lawyers later argued that some of the confessions were obtained under torture; the court disqualified those confessions while upholding the others.
In May 2020, Ben-Uliel was convicted of three counts of murder, as well as attempted murder and arson. In September of that year, he was sentenced to three life terms for murder and another 27 for the other charges. His appeals were rejected by the High Court of Justice in 2022 and he has been in jail since.
Over the past week, thousands of people have contributed more than NIS 1.2 million to a crowdfunding campaign aimed at improving Ben-Uliel’s prison conditions and ultimately securing his release; among the donors are a slew of right-wing figures, including prominent rabbis.
Concurrently, a petition calling for an improvement in his conditions was signed by 14 coalition lawmakers, including several from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party. Yair Netanyahu, the prime minister’s son, shared a post in support. National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir – who represented Ben-Uliel in his previous capacity as a lawyer for suspected Jewish terrorists – is also helping improve his prison conditions, according to Ben-Gvir’s wife.
MK Limor Son Har-Melech of Ben-Gvir’s Otzma Yehudit party attended a conference in support of Ben-Uliel and spoke in his defense. “I know he is innocent,” she said. “I know Amiram is innocent… He is a holy, righteous man, really.” She told those in attendance that she had visited him in prison.
Have we lost the plot entirely?
Amiram Ben-Uliel murdered three innocent people, including a one-year-old child, and left a four-year-old in critical condition. He confessed to the crime multiple times, reenacted it for police, and was convicted following a lengthy trial. His conviction was upheld by the highest court in the land and he is unrepentant. He deserves to be treated just like any other murderer and the notion that his conditions should be improved in any way is utterly without justification.
There is, however, another element of the story that deserves consideration.
The judicial reform
“If anyone needed an illustration of what will happen when the coalition succeeds in weakening Israel’s courts, look no farther than the campaign to raise money, ease prison restrictions, and even free the Duma murderer Amiram Ben-Uliel,” wrote former Post Editor-in-Chief Yaakov Katz on X (formerly Twitter) on Thursday.
The fact that coalition lawmakers and at least one influential government minister are endeavoring to undermine due process in order to ease the prison conditions of a convicted murderer and potentially secure his release should give all Israelis pause. If the judiciary were sufficiently weakened, such a campaign could ultimately inspire the government to override the court’s verdict and set a convicted murderer free. That is a horrifying prospect, but not an entirely outlandish one given the stated aims of some government figures pushing the most extreme version of judicial reform.
Notably, the campaign in support of Ben-Uliel has provoked a backlash, with some public figures on the right speaking out against it and several performing artists refusing to appear alongside a singer who donated to it.
Netanyahu and other leaders on the right should reaffirm their support for the court’s verdict, condemn their colleagues who have supported Ben-Uliel, and state unequivocally that he will continue to serve his sentence and pay for his monstrous crime.