OCCUPIED JERUSALEM, 15 April 2003 — An Israeli military court yesterday sentenced four Palestinians found guilty of organizing last year’s Passover bombing in Netanya to 29 life sentences each, with some judges arguing they should have received the death penalty.
The four men were convicted of equipping a bomber and sending him to blow himself up at the Park Hotel in the northern coastal town of Netanya where a large group of mainly elderly people were celebrating Passover.
Twenty-nine people were killed in the blast which remains the deadliest Palestinian attack in the 30-month intifada, and which triggered an Israeli invasion of the West Bank.
In passing sentence, some of the judges said this was a case which merited the death penalty, but it was not invoked.
The four men, who belonged to the Hamas group, supplied the bomber with a suicide belt, drove him to Netanya, gave him a place to hide and filmed him before he carried out the attack, the radio said.
Each was given 29 life sentences, and an additional 20 years for an additional attack they had planned to carry out immediately after the Netanya bombing.
None of the four showed any regret for what they had done, arguing it was the Israeli occupation which made them do it.
One of the four said at the outset that he did not recognize the authority of the military court to judge him, while another quipped that the four “deserved to win the Nobel peace prize.”
The man convicted of driving the bomber to Netanya argued that he did it to avenge the deaths of innocent Palestinian women and children who had died during the Israeli occupation, the radio said.
Chief prosecutor for the northern West Bank, Capt. Nitzan Sultan, told the radio the men sat through the trial and sentencing with a “devilish smile on their faces” and appeared “happy at the outcome.”
According to Sultan, the judges intimated it might be necessary to change Israeli law to allow for the imposition of the death sentence in cases as severe as this as a deterrent.
Under Israeli law, the death penalty is outlawed except under certain circumstances — one of which pertains to the sentencing of Nazi war criminals and those assisting them. It may also be imposed in a military court under a special panel of judges, court sources said. The only time the death sentence has ever been handed down in Israel was in 1962 following the capture of Adolf Eichmann, one of the main architects of the “Final Solution,” the Nazi extermination plan which killed six million Jews during World War II. He was tried and hanged after being seized in Argentina by an Israeli snatch squad.
