Zemora case: New evidence rejected

Thursday, May 17, 2018, 17:39 The Ofer Military Court rejected the new evidence which the Military Advocate General had submitted to the court and left standing the verdict which exonerated Hamza Faiz, the terrorist who stabbed Nirit Zemora in 2015, of attempted murder. The deliberation at which the penalty for the terrorist will be decided is expected to take place in approximately two weeks’ time.
The new evidence which the Military Advocate General submitted to the court are the minutes of the interrogations of the terrorist which show that the terrorist intended to murder Zemora.
Honenu Attorney Chayim Bleicher, who is assisting Zemora, stated that, “The new evidence proves what is obvious to everyone even without it being brought before the court: The terrorist stabbed with the intent to murder Nirit. Unfortunately the verdict was decided differently.” Bleicher added that the courts should recognize the reality of murderous terror in Israel when handing down their verdicts.
On October 28, 2015, at the Etzion Bloc Intersection parking lot, Hevron resident Hamza Faiz ran towards Zemora with a knife in his hand and called out “Allah akbar” as he stabbed her in the back.
At the April 11 deliberation, Ofer Military Court Judges Lieutenant Colonel Tzvi Heilbron and Major Haim Baliti ruled that it was not possible to prove that Faiz had the intent to kill, exonerated him of attempted murder, and convicted him of aggravated assault and possessing a knife.
After the ruling, Yedidya, the son of the terror victim, wrote on his Facebook page a heartbreaking post sharply criticizing the judges: “Today, on the eve of Holocaust Remembrance Day, the day on which we commemorate the murder of Jews who were murdered solely for being Jews, the judges of the Israeli Defense Forces did not recognize the attempted murder of a Jew solely for being a Jew.
“My mother did not get into a fist-fight with some punk. Someone attempted to murder my mother out of a nationalistic motive.
“In court they dared to argue about the length of the knife and did not accept her attorney’s statement about the length. They accepted only the claim by the attorney for the defense on the matter! And I ask, what does it matter what the length was of the blade with which he planned my mother’s murder, to turn us into orphans and our father into a widower? According to eye-witnesses he ran at my mother with a raised knife while shouting ‘Allah hu akbar’. What do you think he intended to do?”