BICOM

A third person was handed a prison sentence yesterday over the arson attack at a bilingual Jewish-Arab school in Jerusalem a year ago.

Nobody was hurt in the fire at the Max Rayne Hand in Hand School in Jerusalem last December. However, damage was caused to the building and racist graffiti was sprayed, including slogans such as “death to Arabs” and “you can’t co-exist with a cancer.” The school itself is divided equally between Jewish and Arab pupils and there are joint Jewish and Arab head teachers. Students learn both Hebrew and Arabic, celebrate Jewish, Christian and Muslim holidays and learn dual historical narratives.

In July, two brothers, aged 18 and 20 accepted a plea bargain over the case and received 30 and 24-month prison sentences respectively. They are affiliated to the racist Lehava organisation, which campaigns against Jewish-Arab coexistence and has been implicated in a number of hate crimes. Yesterday, a Jerusalem court sentenced a third arsonist, Yitzhak Gabbay to a three-year prison sentence after Gabbay had chosen to reject a plea bargain. In his sentencing, Judge Zvi Segal said that the fire constituted “a blow to the values of human dignity, equality and tolerance.”

Yesterday’s sentencing comes two days after two of the three Jewish Israeli defendants accused of burning to death the Palestinian teenager Mohammed Abu Khadir were convicted of murder. The case last summer shocked Israel and was classified as a terror attack. A verdict on the third defendant has been delayed after his lawyer raised questions over his sanity.

Meanwhile, the Israeli media has been heavily speculating that dramatic progress has been made in one or more cases of Jewish terror. The story is subject to a strict gag order and so there are no further details, but Haaretz quotes the chief of Israel Police who says that he is highly optimistic of solving the arson attack which this summer killed three members of a Palestinian family in the West Bank town of Duma.