Sivan Tahel
+972 Magazine / December 3, 2025
Ministers and activists are pushing to release dozens of prisoners, including murderers, who attacked Palestinians. The state won’t disclose their identities.
In a 111-page letter that his lawyer submitted to President Isaac Herzog on Sunday, Benjamin Netanyahu formally requested a pardon for charges of bribery, fraud, and breach of trust that have been circling him since 2019. The appeal immediately generated headlines around the world and further inflamed deep-running tensions between the Israeli prime minister’s supporters and opponents. But it also coincided with a parallel campaign — one that has drawn much less media attention — by Israel’s far right to obtain presidential pardons for Jewish extremists in prison for violent crimes against Palestinians.
In late October, 11 ministers and 44 other members of the governing coalition signed a letter calling on Herzog to release Jewish prisoners convicted of murder, arson, and other racist attacks. Initiated by Limor Son Har-Melech of Itamar Ben Gvir’s Jewish Power Party (Otzma Yehudit), the letter was sent after Israel agreed to release nearly 2,000 Palestinian detainees (including around 250 prisoners serving life sentences) in exchange for Israeli hostages as part of the Gaza ceasefire deal.
However, the exact number of Jewish “security” prisoners (as distinct from regular “criminal” prisoners), the crimes they are accused of, and the length of their sentences remain unclear. And in response to email requests, the Israel Prison Service, the President’s Residence, the Shin Bet, MK Son Har-Melech (who holds the record among lawmakers for prison visits), and the Honenu legal organization (which defends Israeli Jews accused of security offenses — or, as their website puts it, those who “find themselves in legal entanglements due to defending themselves against Arab aggression, or due to their love for Israel”) all declined to offer any detailed information.
The sentencing of Israeli Jews for attacks against Palestinians is extremely rare. According to data collected by the Israeli human rights group Yesh Din, 94 percent of police investigations into attacks by Israeli settlers on Palestinians are closed without indictment, while the probability of an Israeli soldier being indicted for killing a Palestinian is 0.4 percent.
Still, particularly egregious cases do occasionally end in a prison sentence. A Honenu spokesperson refused to provide a full list of these individuals, but stated that the number of prisoners whose release they had petitioned was “a few dozen” — including some in pre-trial detention, some who were convicted, and some who are in community service. A spokesperson for the Israeli president, meanwhile, said he had received more than 30 pardon requests for Jewish security prisoners.
At the forefront of this campaign — which involves Honenu and Son Har-Melech but is also being driven by “grassroots” far-right activists — are two veteran prisoners whose cases have long generated considerable fervour among the far-right public. The first is the convicted mass murderer Ami Popper, whose sentence Herzog was reportedly considering commuting even before the parliamentarians’ letter, in order to minimize right-wing resistance to a Gaza ceasefire deal and “balance out” the release of Palestinian prisoners.
In 1990, Popper stole his brother’s army uniform and rifle, drove to a bus stop in central Israel, checked the IDs of seven Palestinian labourers waiting there to confirm they were Palestinian, ordered them to kneel down in three rows, and then shot them dead. Over the years, several requests for Popper’s pardon have been rejected, in part due to opposition from the Shin Bet and the State Attorney’s Office.
In addition to Popper, there are growing calls from the far right for Herzog to pardon Amiram Ben-Uliel, who was convicted of the murder of three members of the Dawabsheh family in the West Bank town of Duma in 2015. Ben-Uliel threw Molotov cocktails at the family’s home, killing parents Sa’ad and Reham along with their 18-month-old son Ali. Their eldest son, Ahmad, then 4, survived with severe burns. In May 2020, Ben-Uliel was given three life sentences and another 20 years in prison.
The campaign for their release presents Ben-Uliel as having been falsely imprisoned after he claimed his confession was obtained under torture; Popper, meanwhile, is due to be released in 2030, giving his far-right supporters encouragement that the president may consider letting him out early. By using these two more “winnable” cases as figureheads for the release of dozens of other Jewish security prisoners whose names are not in the public discourse, the campaign seeks to whitewash a long list of murders and brutal attacks.
Who they want freed
Despite the lack of transparency surrounding the identities of the prisoners included in the campaign, I managed to identify a few more from photos that far-right activists posted on social media. One of them is Yaakov (Jack) Teitel, who was convicted in 2013 of the murders of Samir Balbisi and Issa Jabareen, along with attempting to murder a Messianic Jew and planting an explosive device near the home of a leftist academic.
Teitel was arrested at his home in 2009, where police found pistols, explosive devices, and arson materials. His defense attorneys at the time claimed he was unfit to stand trial, but a counter-opinion filed a few months later renewed the proceeding. Teitel was sentenced to two life sentences and an additional 30 years in prison. In 2017, he tried to stab another prisoner.
Two other prisoners whose faces appear on social media as part of the campaign are Noam Elimelech and Naftali Elmakayes, who attacked and severely wounded a Palestinian restaurant worker in Jerusalem in May 2021. Elimelech, who stabbed the victim repeatedly for half a minute, was sentenced to 11 years; Elmakayes, who continued beating him, was given 4.5 years.
Elimelech’s wife, Margalit Ben Lulu, appealed to President Herzog on Oct. 12 — the day of the release of the living hostages from Gaza — requesting that her partner be granted a “humanitarian” pardon. “When the State of Israel releases murderous terrorists in the name of reconciliation and diplomatic deals,” she said, “how can we not allow relief to Jewish prisoners who sought to protect their people?”
Hashtag searches on X (formerly Twitter) identified two more prisoners: Hanoch Akiva Rabin and Raz Chaim Garon, who attacked a Palestinian family with an axe in the West Bank town of Huwara in March 2023.
The pair, who were masked, came to a supermarket parking lot armed also with a hammer, rocks, and pepper spray. Rabin smashed the windows of the family’s car and hit the father who was sitting in the driver’s seat with an axe, causing injuries to his shoulder and hand. Garon and other rioters threw rocks that smashed more of the car’s windows, before continuing to throw rocks into the car from close range that hit the grandfather in the head. Finally, they pepper-sprayed the occupants of the car, shouting “Death to Arabs.”
The State Attorney’s Office requested sentences of between four to six years, but Rabin was sentenced to three and a half years and Garon to three years in prison. In a solidarity video that Garon’s father posted on X, he claimed that his son “remembered who owns the Land of Israel, and showed all the temporary residents their true place — and that’s why he’s in prison.”
On far-right Telegram channels, I managed to identify four more prisoners. These include Yosef Haim Ben-David and his two nephews (minors) who were convicted of the murder of Mohammed Abu Khdeir, a 16-year-old Palestinian from East Jerusalem. During the month of Ramadan in 2014, while Abu Khdeir was on his way to morning prayers, the three kidnapped him, beat him, and forced him into a car where they strangled him unconscious. They then took him to a forest and set him on fire while he was still alive. Two days earlier, the three had attempted to kidnap a 7-year-old boy from another Palestinian neighbourhood of East Jerusalem.
Ben David was sentenced to life and an additional 20 years in prison. One of the minors was sentenced to life imprisonment and the other to 21 years. In 2018, Israel’s Supreme Court rejected the two minors’ appeal, as well as Ben-David’s claim of insanity. The verdict reads: “The extreme malice and wickedness of the act put it on par with cases in which minors have been sentenced to life imprisonment.”
The fourth prisoner I identified on Telegram is Netanel Binyamin, the main suspect in the lynching of Saeed Musa in Bat Yam in May 2021. According to the indictment, Binyamin punched Musa 10 times in the face and kicked him while he was lying on the ground. After passersby removed Binyamin from the scene, he returned, kicked Musa again in the head and threw a bottle at his face with the intention of killing him, and then proceeded to loot his car with other rioters. The State Attorney’s Office sought a sentence of more than 20 years, but in 2023 he was sentenced to only 12.5 years.
It remains to be seen whether the campaign to release these prisoners will succeed, and to what degree President Herzog will bow to pressure. But revealing their identities, their crimes, and who is pushing for their release is a matter of public interest and a basic safeguard against institutional whitewashing of nationalist violence.
The fact that the prison service, the Shin Bet, and members of Knesset are withholding the list precisely while the latter are urging the president to consider pardoning these prisoners normalizes Jewish terror as an ideology of “defense.” If Herzog yields, not only will he further erode public trust in the rule of law; he will officially legitimize some of the most heinous crimes committed by Jews against Palestinians in Israel’s history.
Sivan Tahel is a reporter at the independent Israeli online magazine The Hottest Place in Hell
