Mother of Barkan Terrorist Convicted for Not Stopping Son

A military court has convicted the mother of Ashraf Nalaweh, the murderer of Ziv Hajabi, Hy”d, and Kim Levengard Yechezkel, Hy”d, of failing to prevent her son from committing the terror attack that killed the two. With the decision, the court rejected the claims by attorneys that a mother could not be expected to inform authorities that her son was planning to commit a crime. According to the court, “the value of human life overrides family ties.”

Hajabi and Levengard were murdered last October in a terror attack in the Barkan industrial zone. The two victims, along with Nalaweh, were employed at Alon Metal Works. Nalaweh arrived for work in the morning, carrying with him an assault rifle hidden under his clothing. As a regular employee with a work permit, he was admitted to the grounds of the industrial zone without too much scrutiny, security officials told Yediot Acharonot.

Nalaweh went to the factory’s second floor to fix a problem, but when he saw several workers he went back downstairs, now brandishing his weapon. Witnesses said that he took some plastic ties from a worker on the first floor, and went back upstairs to carry out his attack. He then ran towards Levengard, who was sitting at a desk at the end of the hall. According to some accounts, he tied her hands with the plastic ties, and shot her. He then ran to one of the offices on the floor and shot Hajabi, before running downstairs and out of the building.

It took some two months for security officials to track down Nalaweh, who was killed in a shootout near Shechem in December. During the period that the IDF conducted an intense search for the terrorist, members of his family, including his mother, were arrested, and the family home was demolished.

During the trial, attorneys for the mother claimed she tried to warn her son not to carry out the attack, and that she informed his father, asking him to take action against the son. The court said that was not sufficient. “The actions of the defendant did not have enough force to prevent her son, who was planning to lose his life in the course of the attack, from acting. She also did not ask his father to take the son’s weapon away from him or to report the incident to authorities, nor did she follow up to find out what the father had done. Her actions were not reasonably directed at preventing the attack from taking place, and thus she is convicted of the charges against her,” the court said in its verdict.