Honenu Attorney Ariel Atari; Photo credit: Honenu
Wednesday, September 9, 2026, 15:23 Today (Wednesday), the Central District Court in Lod imposed a particularly harsh sentence on T., a Binyamin resident who was a minor at the time of the incident. He was convicted of killing of Aisha al-Rabi in the Shomron in October 2018. The court handed down a 13-year sentence to T.
The conviction was unusual because the presiding judge, Deputy President of the Central District Court Judge Liora Brody, would have acquitted him on reasonable doubt. He was convicted 2–1 by the two accompanying judges. T.’s family announced that they will appeal both the verdict and the sentence to the Supreme Court, with Honenu’s assistance.
Honenu Attorneys Ariel Atari, counsel for the defendant, and Adi Keidar, stated: “The defendant was convicted of an act he did not commit, as he testified at length in court. The court based its decision on a single piece of evidence — DNA found on a stone at the scene. Leading experts testified that all the evidence indicates someone else threw the stone.
“The presiding judge, Deputy President of the Central District Court Judge Liora Brody, acquitted the young man of all charges in an opinion hundreds of pages long. Her detailed reasoning indicates a strong likelihood that the Supreme Court will reverse the other two judges and acquit him completely.”
In the case, Dr. Chen Kugel, director of the Institute of Forensic Medicine, submitted an opinion that the injuries to al-Rabi’s head were inconsistent with a single blow from a stone. That finding contradicts the indictment and the prosecution’s theory. T.’s conviction rested, unusually, on DNA allegedly recovered from a stone at the scene, despite the opinions of most DNA experts in Israel and abroad who determined that DNA cannot reliably be taken from a stone.
Leading Religious-Zionist rabbis sharply criticized the Shabak almost eight years ago at the detention stage over the harsh interrogations of the minor and his friends, who were ultimately not charged. Rabbi Chaim Druckman then called on Prime Minister Netanyahu to intervene: “I am concerned here with the proper and just running of the State of Israel. ‘Justice, justice shall you pursue’ — justice itself must be pursued justly, not through injustice. I ask you to order that this injustice be stopped immediately.”
Rabbi Shmuel Eliyahu, the Chief Rabbi of Tzfat, then called for the Shabak’s Jewish Department to be shut down: “They do everything they do to justify their own existence, which has no right to exist. They are simply using their imagination. There is no proof, but for the Shabak it photographs well. You arrest minors without a lawyer? What, are they terrorists? You are eroding public trust in the Shabak. You operate by the public’s authority; you are public servants; you are paid by us — you cannot operate this way. Perhaps the time has come to close the Shabak’s Jewish Department.”