Two Palestinian youths were sentenced to life imprisonment Wednesday by a military court in Nablus for killing Israeli soldier Benny Meisner earlier this year while he was on patrol in the West Bank city.
Ibrahim Taktuk and Samir Na’anish drew the maximum sentence for dropping a building block on Meisner’s head from a rooftop in the Nablus casbah.
Four other Palestinians, convicted of being accomplices, were given 15-year sentences each.
The homes of all six were demolished immediately after their arrest by the security forces several months ago.
The prosecutor maintained that Meisner’s murder was a more heinous crime than the stoning of a car in Dhahiriya village five years ago, in which an Israeli woman, Esther Ohana, was killed.
Since the perpetrators in that case received sentences of 11 to 13 years in prison, Meisner’s murderers deserved harsher penalties, the prosecutor argued.
The court agreed on grounds that stoning Ohana’s car was not premeditated murder, whereas the assault on Meisner was.
The Palestinian uprising, meanwhile, continued to take its almost daily toll.
A resident of Beit Lid village, in the Tulkarm region of the West Bank, was killed Wednesday morning in a clash with Israel Defense Force soldiers.
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