TEL AVIV – A group of Palestinian peace activists paid a condolence call to the family of an Israeli teen brutally raped and murdered by a Palestinian terrorist.
The group, accompanied by their Israeli peers, came to the West Bank settlement of Tekoa where the family of 19-year-old Ori Ansbacher is mourning.
“We believe that the violent path brings nothing but violence,” Ziyad Sabatin, of the nearby town of Husan, said.
The Shin Bet security agency on Monday deemed the rape and murder by 29-year-old Hebron resident Arafat Irfayia to be a nationalistically motivated terror attack. Irfayia had expressed his desire to “murder a Jew and become a martyr,” Channel 13 reported.
“There’s no religion in the world that supports this kind of act,” Sabatin said Tuesday in an interview on Israeli radio.
The murder sparked outrage in Israel and senior politicians called for Irfayia and other terrorists to receive the death penalty.
The only time Israel has used the death penalty was in the case of Nazi officer Adolf Eichmann in 1962.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vowed to implement Knesset legislation to begin cutting funds to the Palestinian Authority over its payments to convicted terrorists and their families within a week’s time.
Sabatin said that Israeli coexistence activists had in the past accompanied him on a condolence call in Ramallah to the family of Aisha Rabi, a Palestinian mother of eight killed when a rock was thrown at her in the West Bank in October by a suspected Jewish terrorist.
“We went there to pay condolences together with Israeli friends, and we came to console here today,” he stated.
He charged the media with not also reporting on peaceful Palestinians.
“The interest of journalists is to find where there’s violence,” Sabatin said. “Whenever there’s blood, you see them running there straightaway and making a fuss. Where there’s peace you don’t see that. That’s a problem with journalists. We do a lot for peace, gatherings with people, a ton of activities for peace, coexistence, a shared life.”
Raji Sabatin, Ziad’s cousin who is also a peace activist, said he told the Ansbacher family he condemns violence.
“I said that just as I reject the killing of Palestinians, I reject the killing of Israelis,” he told The Times of Israel. “I also said we must find a way to live together in coexistence.”
The Shin Bet security agency said Irfayia had confessed and reenacted the murder of Ansbacher, which occurred on Thursday while she took a walk in a forest in southern Jerusalem.
On Monday, the Jerusalem Magistrate’s Court extended Irfayia’s remand for an additional ten days.
Irfayia, who sported bruises, cuts and scabs on his face, smirked and rolled his eyes for the cameras.