An Israeli court on Sunday morning sentenced a teenage Palestinian girl from Silwan in occupied East Jerusalem to six years in prison after she was charged with knife possession and planning a stab attack.
Hayat Shweiki told Ma’an that the Jerusalem magistrate’s court formally sentenced her daughter Manar Majdi Shweiki to six years in prison after the girl had already spent more than a year in detention, highlighting that the court postponed the sentencing twice since the beginning of 2017.
Her lawyer Mustafa Yahya said last week that the ruling was postponed because the court was awaiting a report regarding Shweiki’s behavior over the course of her detention, though Yahya said at the time he already reached a plea bargain with the Israeli prosecution that determined the six-year sentence.
Since her detention in December last year, Shweiki has been moved between Israel’s Ramla and HaSharon prisons.
Israeli police first detained her on 6 December in the Wadi Hilweh area of the Silwan, claiming they found a knife in her bag after searching her belongings, though it was unclear what had prompted the search in the first place.
Ma’an reported at the time that Palestinian youths filmed the search and arrest of the girl on their phones, which were later confiscated by Israeli forces, and clashes subsequently broke out in the area with one youth being injured from shrapnel after a stun grenade exploded nearby.
Two days later, Israeli authorities released Shweiki, but on 22 December, Israeli police detained her again on the streets of occupied East Jerusalem’s Old City in the al-Sharaf neighborhood. It remained unclear what prompted forces to detain her the second time.
Her prison sentence is the latest in an Israeli crackdown on young Jerusalemite Palestinians, many of them women, who have been accused of involvement in attacks, while Israeli authorities have ordered lengthy prison sentences for Palestinians as young as 14 years old in both East Jerusalem and the occupied West Bank.
Unless otherwise stated in the article above, this work by Middle East Monitor is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. If the image(s) bear our credit, this license also applies to them. What does that mean? For other permissions, please contact us.
