Israel’s Samaria Military Court decided on Wednesday to replace the judges overseeing the trial of the terrorist accused of killing teenager Binyamin Achimeir, 14, with a two-member panel of Israel Defense Forces lieutenant colonels authorized to impose the death penalty under military law.
Ahmed Duabsha was apprehended 10 days after he murdered Achimeir, who went missing on April 12, 2024, while herding sheep at Gal Farm, located 17 miles northeast of Ramallah in Samaria.
During initial questioning by security forces, Duabsha tied himself to the killing, according to the Israel Security Agency (Shin Bet).
Attorney Haim Bleicher of the Honenu organization, who represents the family, told Kan News on Wednesday: “We welcome the decision of the President of the Samaria Military Court. This is the first step taken in the process of imposing the death penalty on despicable terrorists. Bringing the terrorist before a panel authorized to sentence him to death will contribute to deterrence against anyone contemplating carrying out similar acts of murder.”
Israel’s Ynet outlet, citing from a redacted indictment in June 2024, said that Duabsha and his friends became interested in jihad and Islamic State approximately a year before he carried out the murder.
“The suspect decided that he would go on a killing rampage the next morning at first light,” read the indictment, filed at Ofer Military Court. “He took a knife of around 20 centimeters [8 inches] long, picked out clothes and laid down in his room. The next day, he put on his clothes, prayed, took the knife in his sheath and put a black scarf on his head.”
Following the murder, Duabsha looked for additional Jewish victims in the area, including at Gal Farm, but got frightened by a dog and returned home as he “got tired,” the charges against him added.
Large parts of the unsealed indictment were redacted due to the graphic nature of the murder. Local media reported that there was a long struggle between Achimeir and Duabsha, and that some of the teenager’s clothing items were found scattered near his body.
Bleicher told Israeli media in 2024 that the teenager’s family demanded that Duabsha “be tried before a panel of judges who have the authority to impose the death penalty.”
“The people of Israel are fighting a murderous enemy that has lost all humanity,” said the Israeli lawyer on June 20, 2024, adding: “We must fight the enemy without compromise, defeat them and destroy them.”
IDF courts in Judea and Samaria operate under a separate legal regime from Israel’s civilian justice system, a legacy of the territory remaining under military administration since the 1967 Six-day War.
Military courts have the authority—at least on paper—to impose capital punishment for certain serious offenses, including murder, even though the Jewish state has never carried out such sentences in that system.
Israeli civilian law allows for the death penalty for treason and murder committed by Nazis and their associates. It has only been used twice: Israel Defense Forces officer Meir Tobianski was executed in 1948 for treason. He was later exonerated. Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi official, was executed in 1962 for crimes during the Holocaust.
Legislation to impose the death penalty on terrorists convicted in Israeli civilian courts passed the first of three readings required to become law on Nov. 10 after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu came out in support of National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir’s bill.
A terrorist “convicted of murder out of motives of racism” and “under circumstances, in which the act was carried out with the intention of harming the State of Israel,” per the bill, “shall be sentenced to death.”
