Court also gives NIS 15m. punitive damages ‘legal price tag’
By YONAH JEREMY BOBPrison cell block(photo credit: Wikimedia Commons)
The Judea Military Court on Wednesday sentenced Asem Barghouti to four life sentences for the Givat Assaf shooting attack in 2018.The court also ordered punitive damages of over NIS 15 million to the families of the various victims.Granting large punitive damages is part of a new trend of a “legal price tag” to deter terror and prisoner exchanges.Soldiers Yuval Mor-Yosef and Yosef Cohen were murdered by Barghouti on December 13, 2018, in a shooting attack outside the West Bank settlement of Givat Assaf.In addition, a baby was born prematurely and died days later due to another of his shooting attacks.Three life sentences were given for the murders and the fourth for other attempted murder convictions.Barghouti was arrested in January 2019 by a joint operation of the IDF, Israel Police and the Shin Bet in the West Bank village of Abu Shukheidim, north of Ramallah, at the home of one of his associates.Barghouti, originally from the village of Kobar north of Ramallah, comes from a Hamas-affiliated family and had already spent 11 years in Israeli prisons for security-related crimes, including plans to abduct soldiers.According to the Shin Bet, Barghouti had been planning additional attacks against Israeli targets and was found with a Kalashnikov rifle, large amounts of ammunition and night vision equipment.He carried out the Givat Assaf attack just days after he and his brother, Salah Barghouti, shot seven Israelis in a drive-by-shooting attack near the settlement of Ofra, north of Givat Assaf.
Salah Barghouti was killed during an arrest attempt on December 11, 2018.“The arrest by the Israel Security Agency and soldiers from the Yamam Brigade was the culmination of an intelligence and operational effort that began immediately after the attack, during which the Shin Bet and the IDF used intelligence, operational and technological capabilities to locate the terrorist,” the Shin Bet said in the statement, adding that dozens of operatives and collaborators of Hamas in the West Bank have been arrested."The families of the victims and I welcome the decision of the court and hope that the terrorist will never again walk free," family lawyer Maurice Hirsch said. "To avoid the terrorist enjoying the fat salaries paid to him by the PA, I am calling on Israel's defense minister to immediately return to enforce the new legislation passed recently in Judea and Samaria that would prevent banks operating in the PA from acting as a conduit through which the blood money is paid."Anna Ahronheim contributed to this story.
