The highest court in Hamas-controlled Gaza maintained the sentence of death that a lower court handed down to four Arab men found guilty of brutally attacking and murdering a 16-year-old schoolgirl in 2004.

Usually family or clan members retaliate personally against the perpetrators of such crimes, and such cases do not reach a lower court let alone a higher one. This crime was brutal even by Gaza standards. Thousands of Gazan Arabs demonstrated, shortly after the crime was committed thousands of Gazans staged a protest calling for the death penalty for all four.