The shadowy face of Jewish militancy

Three Jewish settlers were convicted on Wednesday of trying to blow up a Palestinian elementary school last year, one of the few times in th...

Three Jewish settlers were convicted on Wednesday of trying to blow up a Palestinian elementary school last year, one of the few times in the past two decades that Israel has prosecuted crimes committed by Jewish militants against Palestinians. ‘‘Had the bomb gone off as planned, it would have caused casualties and damage,’’ Jerusalem police chief Mickey Levy told Israeli radio on Wednesday.

Shlomo Dvir, 26, Yarden Morag, 25, and Ofer Gamliel, 43, all from the West Bank settlement of Bat Ayin, were found guilty of attempted murder and illegal arms possession.

The Jerusalem District Court did not sentence the men immediately. The court said the three were involved in building a bomb, while Morag and Gamliel placed the two 250-gram bricks of explosives outside the A-Tur girls’ school in eastern Jerusalem.

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The Israeli human rights group B’Tselem says that since December 1987, the start of the first Palestinian uprising against Israeli military occupation, to the end of May 2003, Israeli civilians killed 145 Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, among them 25 children. In the past three years, more than 2,400 Palestinians and 850 Israelis have been killed.

According to B’Tselem, only 13 cases of Palestinians dying at the hands of Israelis in the West Bank have resulted in convictions of murder or manslaughter. Of these 13 convictions, only one person was sentenced to life in prison.

There have been three major cases of violence against Palestinians brought to court over the last 20 years. This summer, Israel announced that a group of nine Israelis settlers was arrested on suspicion of being part of a terrorist cell behind a series of attacks on Palestinians. Only two of them have been indicted, and both were charged with the relatively minor offenses of possessing and transporting stolen explosives.