State of Israel found guilty in death of 10-year-old girl

The NYT reports: A court in Jerusalem make a public ruling Tuesday that the state is guilty in the death of a 10-year-old Palestinian girl who was killed during a demonstration in 2007. Israeli border police attempted to stop a group of young people from throwing rocks in the village of Anata by spraying rubber-coated bullets. One struck her and she died two days later in a Jerusalem hospital.

Her father, an advocate for peaceful solutions between Israel and Palestine, told the New York Times:

We received the news with tears. Her killing is an open wound that will bleed through our lives, even if the killer is punished. But certainly, we felt some justice has been achieved so far. For justice to be complete, her killer must be put in jail.

This ruling could have some very important implications for the future of the Israel-Palestine conflict, where states are rarely held accountable for the violence so common during demonstrations. The NYT reports that “Cases involving Israeli forces wounding or killing Palestinians rarely make it beyond an initial investigation.”

Of course the bottom line is that a young life has been lost…another among so many that have been sacrificed in the ongoing conflict in the Middle East that tears so many families and communities apart. Justice is a heartening, if not vastly inadequate, consolation in such circumstances.