When Israel’s courts become ‘instruments of revenge’ against Palestinian citizens
Israeli police escort right-wing settlers as they attack and clash with Palestinians in the city of Lod/Lyd, 12 May 2021
Vera Sajrawi writes in +972 on 19 November 2025:
For much of the past two years, Palestinian citizens of Israel have been treated as an internal enemy, facing widespread arrests on tenuous charges and heightened restrictions on protesting the mass killing in Gaza. But as the Israeli army unleashed a new degree of brutality in Gaza, and as the Israeli public showed their true colors within a climate of vengeance, what Palestinians inside Israel have experience has echoed a lingering injustice: the events of May 2021.
When Palestinians across Israel rose in solidarity with their kin in Jerusalem, the West Bank, and Gaza in what became known as the “Unity Intifada,” Israel responded with a violent crackdown and issued a state of emergency. Large Jewish-Israeli mobs attacked Palestinian homes and cars in so-called “mixed cities,” and border police were deployed into Haifa, Lyd, Jaffa, and Akka, unleashing a wave of arrests, beatings, raids, imprisonment, and trauma that still haunts Palestinians in Israel to this day.
The brutality of that moment has never really receded. For many of Israel’s Palestinian citizens, it remains a reminder of the shallow liberties of second-class citizenship. And two recent court rulings related to the murders of a Jewish-Israeli and a Palestinian have brought the events of 2021 back into sharp relief.
On Sept. 30, Israel’s Supreme Court rejected a final petition filed by the family of Musa Hassuna, a 31-year-old Palestinian citizen from Lyd (known in Hebrew as Lod) who was shot dead on May 10, 2021, by armed Jewish residents belonging to a religious-Zionist group known as the Garin Torani (Torah Nucleus). The appeal challenged the Israel Police’s closure of the criminal investigation into five Jewish-Israeli suspects in his murder, which lawyers alleged had been compromised by “incomplete ballistic analyses, failure to interview Palestinian witnesses, and early police statements raising concerns about the investigation’s lack of impartiality.”
The court’s decision was issued the same week that seven Palestinians — all working at a wedding hall that was attacked by an Israeli mob the day after Hassuna’s murder — were sentenced by the Lod District Court to between 12 and 14 years in prison over the killing of 56-year-old Jewish-Israeli Yigal Yehoshua.
During a riot the day after Hassuna was killed, Yehoshua was struck in the head by a stone thrown by a Palestinian while driving his car through Lyd, and later succumbed to his wounds. Yet the court failed to establish which, if any, of the seven Palestinians had thrown the fatal stone, and ignored evidence that interrogators extracted confessions through physical and psychological torture.
The Palestinian defendants were charged in June 2021 with murdering Yehoshua as an act of terror; this has allowed Israeli prosecutors to seek a longer sentence for the crime, despite lawyers showing the men had no history or intent of committing a terrorist act. Yehoshua’s family is now demanding an even harsher punishment closer to 25 years.
Khaled Zabarqa, a lawyer who represented and supported families in both cases, called the contrast a disgrace. The Israeli police, intelligence, and prosecution worked together, he said, “to accuse and condemn the Palestinians because they are Palestinians, and to defend the Jewish shooters [and allow them] to get away with murder.”