Zemora case: Compensation demand

Wednesday, May 23, 2018, 16:13 On Wednesday, May 23, Honenu Attorney Chayim Bleicher, who is representing Nirit Zemora, submitted a demand for five million NIS in compensation to the Ofer Military Court. The demand was submitted in the framework of the deliberation to decide the penalty for the terrorist who stabbed and seriously injured Zemora at the Etzion Bloc Intersection parking lot on October 28, 2015.
The sum is based on a calculation of the damages caused by the terrorist to Zemora, which include the injury, pain, suffering and punitive damages. Bleicher supports his demand with paragraph 182 of the relevant order regarding security provisions, in which military law authorizes the court judges sitting at a criminal deliberation to award compensation according to a calculation of the damages which is usually submitted in civil suits.
“The defendant injured Nirit out of racial and nationalistic motives because she is Jewish. The complainant neither injured him nor had any dispute with him. In light of the severity of the assault and the motivation, the maximum punitive damages permissible by law must be imposed on him,” wrote Bleicher.
During the deliberation Zemora demanded that the judges hand down the maximum legal penalty to the terrorist, and leveled criticism at the decision by the court to exonerate the terrorist of attempted murder: “The fact that I am standing here alive and on two feet must not by any means be attributed to the murderer who is sitting here in this courtroom. This same murderer assaulted me from behind out of cowardice and calculated consideration and left me wallowing in my own blood.
“Standing here are Yanai Weisman, Hadar Buchris, Reuven Aviram, 13-year-old Hallel Ariel, who was stabbed as she slept, Aharon Benita, Nehemia Lavi, Rabbi Itamar Ben Gal, Hadas Malka, Adiel Kolman, Ron Kokai, Ziv Mizrahi, Yossi, Haya, and Elad Salomon – a father with his children – Shlomit Krigman, Daphna Meir, Hannah Bladon, Taylor Force.
“Each name is a complete world, some of them children, youths who had not yet merited starting a family and some of them left behind widows, widowers, orphans and family. What all have in common is that they were murdered in cold blood by knife-wielding terrorists at about the same time I was injured. The slight difference between them and me is that by the grace of G-d the terrorist’s knife broke in my back,” said Zemora before the judges.