JERUSALEM: A court sentenced two young Israelis to life and 21 years in prison on Thursday for the 2014 burning alive of a Palestinian teenager, a case that has been closely watched at a time of renewed unrest.

The sentencing came amid a wave of Palestinian stabbings, shootings and car-rammings that erupted in October, including an attack in Jerusalem on Wednesday that killed a policewoman.

The two Israelis sentenced were minors at the time of the chilling attack in which they and a third man snatched Mohammed Abu Khdeir, 16, from an east Jerusalem street and subsequently killed him.

The Israeli sentenced to 21 years, the youngest of the three who was said to have psychiatric problems, was found to have remained in the car when Abu Khdeir was killed.

Israeli settler Yosef Haim Ben-David, 31, is said to have led the attack on Abu Khdeir but his lawyers say he suffers from a mental illness and was not responsible for his actions at the time.

The court has found that he committed the crime but is yet to rule if he is mentally competent.

The two others were 16 when they killed Abu Khdeir in 2014 but are now 18.

The court, which has not identified them because they were minors at the time, noted they were from ultra-Orthodox Jewish families.

Abu Khdeir’s mother, Suha, screamed when the sentences were announced in the packed courtroom. Both she and her husband Hussein criticised the decision to sentence one of the Israelis to 21 years.

Hussein Abu Khdeir again called for their homes to be demolished, as Israel regularly does for Palestinian attackers.

“This is the life of Mohammed we are talking about,” Suha Abu Khdeir said.

“He did not deserve this”. Both convicts were ordered to pay the Abu Khdeir family 30,000 shekels ($7,677) each, but the family said they would refuse to take the money.Abu Khdeir’s killing was part of a spiral of violence that led to a 50-day war in the Gaza Strip in summer 2014.

He was kidnapped from Israeli-annexed east Jerusalem on July 2, 2014 and beaten, with his burned body found hours later in a forest in the western part of the city.

A forensic report showed smoke in his lungs, indicating he was alive when set alight.

It was seen as revenge for the killing of Israelis Naftali Frenkel, Gilad Shaer and Eyal Yifrach, who were abducted from a hitchhiking stop near the flashpoint West Bank city of Hebron.

Israeli authorities said the suspects had decided to kill an Arab in revenge and equipped themselves with cable ties, petrol and other materials before randomly choosing Abu Khdeir. The court’s actions came with tensions once again high.

Published in Dawn, February 5th, 2016