The Regional Court of Jerusalem has sentenced the three
murderers of the avreich R' Dovid Catorza Hy'd to life-
in-prison, after they were be convicted by their own
admission as part of a plea-bargaining deal. As part of the
deal, the commander of the Hamas unit which murdered Catorza
was sentenced to eighteen years in prison after he was
convicted only of abetting the murder.
The members of the Hamas unit also planned to explode a booby-
trapped car on Straus Street in the heart of Jerusalem. One
of the members of the unit, Shu'ayiv Abu Sanina agreed to
explode the car. However the plan didn't materialize after
Mochi A-din A-Sharif, one of the heads of the military arm of
the Hamas organization, was killed while preparing the booby-
trapped car in Ramallah. They also had plans to kidnap a
soldier as a hostage.
R' Dovid Catorza, who immigrated to Israel from France in
1995, was stabbed to death early in the morning of Tu
BeShevat, 5758 (February 11, 1998), on his way to shul
early in the morning kevosikin in Jerusalem's Ramat
Shlomo neighborhood.
The state prosecutor and the lawyers for the defendants,
Jawad Boulos and Lea Tsemel, had agreed to a plea arrangement
which included a revised indictment and agreement on the
sentence both sides would request of the court. The judges
accepted the arrangement.
However, they wrote that Abasi deserved a stiffer sentence.
"The accused was the living spirit behind this organization
which led to murder," they wrote. "He planned the car bomb.
He was the head of the gang, he established it, he enlisted
its members, he guided it, he assigned it its missions, he
commanded it and he supplied it with money and arms."
After the gang decided to kill a Jew, they purchased two
knives and drove around Jewish neighborhoods looking for a
victim, the judges wrote.
In the early morning of February 11, 1998, they drove to
Ramat Shlomo, "where they spotted David Catorza, who was on
his way to shul. Accused numbers two and three got out
of the car, each with a knife in his hand. They approached
Catorza, who had his back to them, and stabbed him . . .
until they were sure he was dead."
A maggid shiur who arrived in the neighborhood at 6:25
a.m. to give his daily shiur noticed a suspicious car
and called the police. They immediately dispatched a patrol
car which arrived in the area at 6:36. They were driving
around trying to find the suspicious car when they were
summoned to the scene of the murder.
It was only about a year ago, some four months after the
murder, that R' Catorza was recognized as a victim of hostile
terror. The police at first refused to certify that this was
the case, since they had no information whatsoever, and it
was only the efforts of MK Rabbi Moshe Gafni, who involved
then-Prime Minister Netanyahu, that won the family this
recognition and all the rights and benefits that go with
it.
