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| The now-widowed Hadas Mizrachi and five of her children in much happier times, with her murdered husband Baruch Z”L [Image Source]. A family devastated by another Shalit Deal catastrophe |
Another beneficiary of the catastrophic 2011 Shalit Deal was re-sentenced yesterday by an Israeli court. This has gotten only minor media attention, even here in Israel.
The deal we’re referring to is the massive active of terrorist extortion that induced Israel to allow 1,027 convicted terrorists, fully half of them (by our careful count) murderers or attempted murderers, to walk free in order to secure the release from Hamas of an Israeli hostage, Gilad Shalit. The terrorist of whom we write below was central to of our earlier posts: “15-Apr-14: Seder night shooting attack: dead and wounded Israeli victims” and “23-Jun-14: Quietly, inexorably, almost entirely unreported, the lethal consequences of the Shalit Transaction grow“
Ynet says Ziad Awad
who was convicted of murdering Chief Superintendent Baruch Mizrahi and wounding his wife Hadas in April 2014, was sentenced to two life sentences on Monday. The presiding judge also took into account that Awad had carried out the attack despite being one of the terrorists released as part of the Gilad Shalit deal. Baruch Mizrahi was killed on the eve of Passover while driving with his wife Hadas and five children to the West Bank settlement of Kiryat Arba, to take part in the Passover Seder (feast). Awad, who is a resident of the Palestinian West Bank town of Idhna, opened fire on the vehicle, killing Baruch, seriously injuring Hadas and lightly wounding one of their children. [“2 life sentences for terrorist previously released in Shalit deal“, Ynet, September 3, 2017]
Back in 2014, the New York Times reported that Awad, born in 1972, had been
freed from a life sentence for murdering Palestinians suspected of collaborating with Israel as part of the [Shalit] 2011… The authorities said Mr. Awad and his 18-year-old son, Izzedin Hassan Ziad Awad, were arrested May 7 [2014] for the April 14 slaying of the police commander… The authorities said that the younger Mr. Awad had produced the murder weapon, an AK-47 stained with his father’s DNA, and told interrogators that his father said his motive was religious because Islam promised paradise to anyone who kills a Jew. Mr. Mizrahi’s wife, Hadas, who was pregnant and wounded in the shooting, said Monday that his death shows the danger of releasing prisoners, an increasingly contentious issue in Israel, and called for Israel to institute the death penalty. “If they did not have a bargaining chip, my husband would have been alive today,” Ms. Mizrahi said in an interview on Army Radio… [“Palestinian Freed in 2011 Is Charged by Israel in a Killing“, New York Times, June 23, 2014]
The religious piety cited by the terrorist is worth turning over in our minds. It was described elsewhere just after their arrests this way:
Before launching the attack, Awad confided in his son that he had religious motivation, saying that, “according to Islam, whoever kills a Jew goes to heaven.” [Ynet, June 23, 2014]
How dedicated was this killer to the creation of a Palestinian Arab homeland? Or to ending the so-called occupation? Pretty to us that the religious passions motivating Palestinian Arab terror, and terror in general, don’t get enough close attention.
The 2014 terror attack was executed on Route 35 near the Tarqumiya-Idhna road junction near Hebron. Izzadin Awad, the son, was convicted of materially aiding the murder done by his father, and sentenced yesterday to 20 years in prison. He was ordered to pay the Mizrahi family NIS 250,000.
Commander Mizrachi was the father of five children aged at the time of the terror attack between three and thirteen. As the NY Times report says, his widow Hadas who was also shot – as was their nine year old son – and was pregnant at the time of the murder.
The go-free list issued in October 2011 in the two days before the Shalit Deal was consummated says Awad – whom it calls Awadh Ziad Awadh al-Salaima Awad, releasee number 431 – was “expelled” to the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip which may be related to his Hamas affiliation (described as a fact in this Arab source that says his son is a Hamas agent too).
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| Baruch Mizrachi, murdered by the Awads [Image Source] |
How did Awad leave there and become involved once again in terror in the vicinity of the Israeli communities of Judea and Samaria?
No one that we can find has offered an explanation. Our familiarity with the terms of the commutation-of-sentence that the Shalit Deal beneficiaries were granted causes us to believe that being expelled means they were forbidden from returning to where they used to live before they were convicted. So it’s a real question, and really troubling. He had been arrested in 1993 and convicted on multiple charges including the murder of fellow Arabs, attempted murder, membership of a banned organization (we presume Hamas) and hurling fire-bombs at people (presumably Jewish people). He was sentenced to life imprisonment, but in the end only served a small part of that.
His victim, Baruch Mizrachi, made a significant contribution to the well-being of Israelis in his tragically-shortened life. The official memorial page posted by the government of Israel says he
served in the IDF and the Israel Police for nearly three decades. For 25 years he served in various roles in the IDF, the last of which was as lieutenant colonel in the elite 8200 intelligence unit. After retiring from the army in June 2011, Mizrahi joined Israel Police, and for the past three years held a senior intelligence position in the Israel Police and was in charge of tracking organized crime. He was posthumously promoted to the rank of commander.
Baruch Mizrachi’s widow was quoted last night [here] observing correctly that Palestinian Arab terrorists who are taken into Israeli custody
“receive grant money from the Palestinian Authority, supplies from the Red Cross and living conditions that many Israeli families in need can only dream of. We need to put an end to the terrorists’ celebrations.”
The PA money that has been coming to the Awads puts them well above the earnings level of ordinary Palestinian Arabs and even of senior members of its civil service. That’s of course, deliberate. The more Israelis the prisoner kills, and the longer the prison sentence he or she gets, the higher the monthly payment that reaches him/her and the family.
It’s an image that the relative few – we among them – who pay attention to the human price of catastrophic releases of unrepentant terrorists need to keep in our minds. It’s not just that Palestinian Arab society puts shooters like the Awads on a pedestal. It’s that foreign aid, provided by unwitting taxpayers in European, American and other Western countries whose governments pretend goes to improve the lives of ordinary Palestinian Arabs, is the indispensable fuel for the Abbas’ regime’s unspeakable and well-lubricated [“25-Jul-17: The scale of the PA’s terror-funding scheme keeps growing“] incitement and encouragement of the murder of Jews. And as payment schemes go, it’s been proven to get relatively law-abiding Palestinian Arabs to consider killing one of their Israeli neighbours for the sake of their families [“11-Jul-17: Incitement to terror: Sometimes it really is all about the money“]
The Rewards for Terror scheme (the PA calls it something else but our name is more accurate) is an indefensible, immoral and entirely counter-productive reality that is long overdue for being stopped. Even people who see themselves as friends of Israel don’t seem to appreciate that this can be stopped and easily. Those with the power to stop it are the funders. Many of them, we know, are reading this post but simply don’t realize their elected and appointed officials can allow it to continue because analyses like the one we have just written in this post never get into their local mainstream media. Maybe they should.
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