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Trio who attacked Arab man on Olga Beach sentenced to four years in prison – Crime in Israel

Theo

Earlier this month, the Haifa District Court sentenced three Jewish teenagers to less than four years in prison for throwing a Molotov cocktail at a young Arab man and his partner on the Olga Beach promenade near Hadera in 2022.

The man from Umm el-Fahm was sitting on the promenade of Olga Beach with his partner, a young woman from Hadera who originally comes from the former Soviet Union.

The public prosecutor demanded a sentence of 5 to 7 years in prison. However, in an agreement with the defense, the more serious criminal offenses of a terrorist act had previously been converted into the criminal offenses of attempted bodily harm with a “racist national-ethnic motive” and weapons offenses. The terrorist offenses were deleted.

The Shin Bet (Israel’s domestic intelligence service) investigated the incident together with the Hadera police station and the Menashe area crime prevention unit in the Coastal Police District.

They managed to extract confessions from the three suspects, 21-year-old Aviel Gavrilov from Hadera, 18-year-old Aviel Goldstein from Hadera and 25-year-old David Teyer from Pardes Hana.

Olga Beach (Source: Wikimedia Commons)

“Brawling and violent”

Judge Erez Porat stated: “The defendants joined forces to carry out a violent and brutal action. This included the production and use of unsafe and dangerous Molotov cocktails, which were defined in the verdict as a weapon for general use. The action was directed against an innocent victim whose only ‘sin’ was that he was an Arab visiting Olga Beach.”

The judge imposed 42-month prison sentences on Gavrilov and Goldstein and 45-month prison sentences on Teyer.

Teyer was already serving a two-year prison sentence after being convicted of the murder of an Arab in Givat Olga.

Each of them was ordered to compensate his victim with a symbolic sum of 1,000 shekels for the Arab man and another 1,000 shekels for the young woman who accompanied him.

Defense attorneys Avraham Sofer and Assaf Gonen as well as Adi Kider, legal advisor to the right-wing extremist organization “Honenu,” argued for even lighter sentences.

“In my opinion, the court in this case made a mistake in its verdict and was too harsh on the defendants, and this is in complete contrast to the significant corrections made to the indictment as part of the agreement, both in terms of the facts of the case and the articles of the law,” Gonen told Walla. “We are considering our steps.” Sofer and Kider declined to comment on the verdict.

The attack of 2022

The incident described in the indictment occurred in 2022 against the backdrop of several incidents of violence and unrest that occurred at Olga Beach at that time, leading to tensions and friction between Jews and Arabs.

The three young men, who live nearby, had planned to throw Molotov cocktails at Arab citizens who were on the beach.

On the night of June 11, they met and prepared three Molotov cocktails, then put on long-sleeved clothing and gloves, put on balaclavas and marched to Olga Beach with the Molotov cocktails in a bag. They arrived at the beach shortly after midnight and discovered the young Arab and his partner sitting on concrete steps of the seafront promenade, looking out to sea.

They approached them from behind and asked the young man in Arabic: “What time is it?” to make sure he was indeed an Arab. He turned his head in their direction and actually replied in Arabic that it was 12:45 a.m. They then turned his face back to the sea and threw a flaming Molotov cocktail in the direction of the couple.

Fortunately, the Molotov cocktail did not break. The young Arab and his partner managed to get up and escape, and the three of them threw a second Molotov cocktail at him, which he also managed to dodge.

The Arab and his partner fled from the three, each in a different direction, but they continued to pursue the Arab with the third Molotov cocktail and only broke off the pursuit when Aviel Goldstein’s clothes caught fire from the detonated explosive device.

“Three chasing one,” is how Judge Erez Porat put it. Luckily, the young Arab managed to get to his car in the parking lot and escape.

“They found an innocent victim – an Arab – and attacked him without provocation,” Judge Porat said. “This is a purely brutal act that amounts to vigilantism and an attempt to create a general ‘deterrent’ against those who have nothing to do with the tensions.”

“We cannot tolerate such offensive acts, which undermine public order as a whole and damage the fabric of coexistence between Jews and Arabs in the country. Such acts lead to a general escalation, the outcome of which cannot always be predicted in advance.”

He noted how the defense argued that the incident did not occur against a backdrop of security tensions in Israel and that “if there had been such tensions, this would have added an additional aggravating factor that is not present in this case.”

The Attorney General’s Office explained that the prevailing atmosphere in the country and the need for safe coexistence of all people made it necessary to toughen and increase the penalties for these crimes, as this punishment would have a deterrent effect on those who take the law into their own hands and on those who harm others simply because they are of a different nationality, religion, race or gender.

The judge also gave weight to the trio’s confession in the agreement that, as mentioned, resulted in an amended and reduced charge. He explained that he took into account their young age and the reasons for their lives, the time they spent in custody and the time they wore tracking bracelets.

Gavrilov, who has no criminal record and has been behind bars since his arrest (with a one-third reduction in his sentence for good behavior), could be released in six months.



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