Supreme Court justices Hanan Meltzer, Noam Solberg, and Uri Shoham reduced by several months the sentences on the six Arab youth from Kfar Zemer in the Hefer Valley near Hadera who threw Molotov cocktails at cars on Highway 6.
The incident took place in October, 2015 between the Nitzanei Oz and Baqa interchanges. The Arabs walked onto the pedestrian bridge over the highway and threw burning Molotov cocktails onto vehicles, forcing cars to veer out of their lanes at high speed. Thankfully, no one was injured.
The District Court sentenced the youths to between 12 and 33 months in prison, but the Arabs appealed to the Supreme Court, which reduced each of their sentences by several months based on the precedent of lighter sentences given to other youths from the same village who had also been convicted of throwing Molotov cocktails.
The Supreme Court justices explained that their decision “should not be taken as a general rule for such cases, because the sentence should reflect the level of punishment appropriate to the particular circumstances and because there are significant differences between the two cases. However, we have come to the conclusion that there is room for some lessening of the punishment of the appellants in order to moderate to some extent the gaps between the sentences of the two groups.”