BLACKTOWN, AUSTRALIA – FEBRUARY 14: An auctioneer’s gavel is seen prior to the home auction for a four-bedroom house at 230 Blacktown Road on February 14, 2015 in Blacktown, Australia. The Blacktown home sold for AUD$565,000 at auction today, smashing the reserve set at AUD$1. The Sydney home auction clearance rate is expected to remain high following the Reserve Bank’s interest rate cut to 2.25 per cent last week. (Photo by Mark Metcalfe/Getty Images) JERUSALEM (JTA) — A Jewish-Israeli man was convicted of the murder of three members of a Palestinian family in a firebombing on their home in the West Bank village of Duma.
Amiram Ben Uliel, 26, was convicted on three counts of murder and two counts of attempted murder, as well as two counts of arson, and was acquitted of membership in a terror group on Monday morning by the Lot District Court.
The firebombing on July 31, 2015, killed Riham and Saad Dawabsha and their toddler son, Ali Saad Dawabsha. Ahmed Dawabsha, then 5, survived the attack but required months of treatment for his burns. He now lives in Duma with his extended family.
Ben Uliel’s attorney said his client would appeal to the Supreme Court. A sentencing hearing was scheduled for June 9.
Ben Uliel had refused to testify before the court on his own behalf. He confessed to the attack three times during interrogations by the Israel Security Agency, or Shin Bet. Two of the confessions were thrown out by the court in 2018 for being coerced.
But the court decided that one of Ben-Uliel’s admissions of planning and committing the attack was usable since it was made well after the end of the physical pressure and was “given willingly.” It declined to rule on whether the pressure during the interrogation by the Israel Security Agency, or Shin Bet, was torture or what the agency calls “enhanced interrogation.”
Ben Uliel had re-created the crime in great detail, and also had a knowledge of details that investigators were not aware of at the time of his confession.
A confession that also pointed the finger at Ben Uliel given by a minor defendant in the case was disqualified after the court decided that it was coerced. The defendant, a minor at the time of the attack, agreed to a plea bargain in which he admitted to planning the attack but was not accused of murder.
The indictment said that Ben-Uliel was motivated to carry out the attack as revenge for the murder of a Jewish Israeli in his 20s in a Palestinian drive-by shooting a month earlier, which took place near Duma.
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