Haifa court sentences trio who attacked Arab man at Olga beach to four years in prison

At the beginning of this month, the Haifa District Court sentenced three Jewish youths to less than four years in prison for throwing a Molotov cocktail at a young Arab man and his partner on the promenade of Olga Beach near Hadera in 2022.

The Man from Umm el-Fahm was sitting on the promenade of Olga Beach with his partner, a young woman from Hadera, originally from the Former Soviet Union. 

אביאל גברילוב (21), אביאל גולדשטיין (18) ודוד תייר (25) שעד לאחרונה עבד באגף החופים בעיריית חדרה - מואשמים בהתארגנות לעבירות טרור כנגד ערבים והשלכת בקבוק תבערה בחוף אולגה. בחקירות סיפרו שחשו זעם ותסכול והחליטו לעשות מעשה ולהרתיע לאור הצקות של ערבים המגיעים לחוף@newsisrael13 pic.twitter.com/zkhGQ8HBaR

— Efrat Finkel (@EfratFinkel) July 28, 2022

The prosecution requested that they be sentenced to 5 to 7 years in prison. However, earlier, in a plea deal with their defense attorneys, the more serious offenses of an act of terrorism were converted to the offenses of attempting to injure under aggravated with a "racist national-ethnic motive" and weapons offenses. The terrorist offenses were removed.

The Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency) investigated the incident together with the Hadera police station and the crime-fighting unit of the Menashe area in the Police Coastal District.

They managed to extract the confessions from the three suspects, Aviel Gavrilov from Hadera, 21 years old; Aviel Goldstein from Hadera, 18 years old; and David Teyer from Pardes Hana, 25 years old.

"Thuggish and violent"

Judge Erez Porat noted that "the defendants joined together in a violent and thuggish action that included the production and use of Molotov cocktails that were unsafe and dangerous, that were defined in the ruling as a general-use weapon, against an innocent victim, whose only 'sin' was the fact that he was an Arab visiting Olga beach."

The judge imposed a 42-month prison sentence on Gavrilov and Goldstein, and a 45-month prison sentence on Teyer.

Teyer was already serving a two-year prison sentence after being convicted of the murder of an Arab in Givat Olga.

Each of them was ordered to compensate their victims with a symbolic sum of 1,000 shekels for the Arab man, and an additional 1,000 shekels for theyoung woman who was with him.

The defense attorneys, Avraham Sofer and Assaf Gonen, and Adi Kider - the legal advisor of the far-right "Honenu" organization, argued for even lighter sentences.

"In my opinion, in this case, the court erred in its sentencing and was overly harsh with the defendants, and this is completely separate from the significant corrections made to the indictment as part of the plea agreement, both in the facts of the case and in the articles of the legislation," Gonen told Walla, "We are considering our steps." Sofer and Kider chose not to comment on the sentence.

The 2022 attack

The event described in the indictment took place in 2022, against the background of several incidents of violence and disorder that occurred at that time on Olga Beach and created tension and friction between Jews and Arabs.

The three young men who live nearby planned to throw Molotov cocktails at Arab citizens who were on the beach.

On the night of June 11, they met and made three Molotov cocktails, then put on clothes with long sleeves and gloves, put hooded hats on their heads, and marched to Olga Beach with the Molotov cocktails in a bag. A little after midnight, they arrived at the beach and spotted the young Arab man and his partner sitting on concrete steps on the boardwalk, looking out to sea.

They approached them from behind and asked the young man in Arabic, "What time is it?" to make sure that he was indeed an Arab. He turned his head in their direction and indeed replied in Arabic that it was 12:45 a.m. Then, after turning his face back towards the sea, the three threw a lit Molotov cocktail in the couple's direction.

Fortunately, the Molotov cocktail did not shatter. The young Arab man and his partner got up to escape, and the three threw a second Molotov cocktail at him, which he also managed to avoid.

The Arab  man and his partner fled from the three, each in a different direction, but they continued and chased the Arab man with the third Molotov cocktail and stopped the chase only when  Aviel Goldstein's clothes caught on fire from the lit explosive.

"Three hounding one", Judge Erez Porat called it. The young Arab man luckily managed to get to his car in the parking lot and escape.

"They found an innocent victim - an Arab, and attacked without any provocation," Judge Porat stated, "This is a purely thuggish action, which constitutes taking the law into one's hands and an attempt to create a general 'deterrence' against those who have no known connection to the tensions."

"We must not put up with such offensive acts that undermine the public order as a whole and harm the fabric of shared life between Jews and Arabs in the country. Such acts create an overall escalation whose outcome cannot always be predicted in advance."

He noted, as the defense attorneys claimed, that the incident did not occur against the background of security tensions in Israel and that "if there had been such a tension, it would have added an additional aggravating aspect, which does not exist in this case."

The Attorney-General's office claimed that the prevailing atmosphere in the country and the need for safe coexistence for all people necessitated that the punishment level for these offenses be made worse and raised, as the punishment will send a deterrent message to anyone who takes the law into their own hands and to those who choose to harm others solely because they are different in nationality, religion, race or gender.

The judge also gave weight to the trio's confession in the plea deal that, as mentioned, gave rise to an amended and softened indictment. He stated that he took into account their young age and the reasons for their lives, the time they spent in physical arrest, and the time wearing tracking bracelets.

Gavrilov, who has no criminal record and has remained behind bars since he was arrested, with a one-third deduction for good behavior, may be released in six months.