“There Would Be No End”: The Killing of PWD Workers by Border Police officers

The day after the murder of the two Palestinians, the police began investigating the incident. From the start, police investigators focused the investigation on Border Police personnel who served in the area. On October 10 at 10:25 a.m., less than two days after the murder, the driver, Eliyahu Elias, was questioned by the police and gave his version of events. Elias briefly and succinctly described the sequence of events from the moment he left the base with Sergeant Illouz, and what happened in the car after Illouz shot the two Palestinians: “On the way to Beit Shemesh of course we talked about the incident and he [Illouz] told me not to tell anything about what happened […] I also realized that out of collegiality at work and also him being my commander that it should not be talked about, and especially after my friends were killed in this war. It didn’t trouble me, because as I said – before my eyes were also my friends who fell.”

About two hours after Illuz (the driver) gave the police his version of the events, Sergeant Albert Illouz was also questioned. In his statement, Ilouz did not try to hide what happened two days earlier, in the moments after a truck carrying two Palestinians from the West Bank almost collided with the vehicle in which he was traveling. “The picture in front of me seemed horrible, and I could not allow an Arab to literally treat me with such contempt”, he told the police investigator. “I decided on my own to take an eye for an eye. I got the guys out of the car and decided to eliminate them, otherwise there would be no end to it.”

About three months after the two Palestinians were shot in the back, an indictment was filed in the Jerusalem District Court against Border Police officers Albert Ilouz and Eliyahu Elias. The charge against the two: murder.

Following the filing of an indictment against the two police officers, the Israeli newspapers started to report on the developments in the trial. During the trial of the two, the question arose as to whether Sergeant Ilouz’s statement to the police, in which he confessed to the murder and described the chain of events, was admissible. This is after Ilouz’s lawyer made the claim that Ilouz’s statement was given after the police investigator assured him that if he told police what happened he would not be prosecuted. The police inspector who investigated Ilouz denied the defense’s claim. Another question discussed during the trial was whether policeman Elias had to comply when Sergeant Ilouz demanded he hand over his weapon, which Ilouz used to shoot the two Palestinians.

After 10 months of hearings, the judges of the Jerusalem District Court handed down the verdict. In the verdict, the judges detailed the defenses of the defendants: Illouz’s defense attorney initially claimed that the confession was obtained illegally from him, and that he was manipulated by investigators, who promised that if he told the truth about what happened the case would be closed, and he would not be prosecuted. Elias’ defense attorney also tried to go in a similar direction when he sought to delve into the culture of the Border Police in order to try and release his client from responsibility for the incident. After this line of defense failed, the lawyer took a new approach and claimed that Illouz committed the murder when he was out of control of his actions and was in a fit of paranoia. To substantiate the claim, a detailed opinion of a psychiatrist was presented, supported by the testimony of two other psychologists. The court rejected these claims as well as the expert opinions and convicted Ilouz of murder. Elias was convicted as an accessory to murder. Both were sentenced to life in prison.

Both Illouz and Elias appealed the Court ruling. For Ilouz even an appeal did not help, and his conviction for murder remained unchanged. In the case of Elias, the judges decided to further reduce his responsibility for the incident and convict him of a reduced offense, accessory to manslaughter. But they too could not completely ignore the atmosphere in which the two Border Police officers operated, which allowed them to try and justify the act of murder by relying on values ​​like friendship or military camaraderie or diminishing its significance in the light of war events. Particularly notable is the statement of Supreme Court Justice Moshe Landau, who was a member of the panel that heard the two’s appeals. In response to Elias’ claim that in the name of his relationship with his commander he thought there was no need to talk about what happened and that the whole incident did not bother him given the death of his comrades in war, Landau wrote that he “sees these statements as a poor attempt to find some justification in retrospect for a crime committed by Illouz.”