Her Story
An Israeli parole board freed a Kafr Qasem schoolgirl's killer early
Graphic: Times of Palestine
Original Reporting
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A girl in the eleventh grade left her house in Kafr Qasem one morning twenty-three years ago and was shot four times on the way to school. The man who shot her was her cousin, and the killing was recorded as a family-honour murder.
An Israeli parole board has now cut a third off his sentence and released him, the Israeli news site Ynet reported this weekend. He had served about twenty-two years of a life term. The conditions attached are a hostel, full-time work and house arrest at night when he is on leave.
Her family learned of the decision after it was taken. "When we knew he would be released we lost our minds," a relative told the paper. "We never agreed to this."
What the family disputes#
The relative's objection was not only to the release. It was to the word attached to the case for twenty-three years.
She had ended an engagement, the family said — to a friend of the man who killed her, after she came to know his character — and she was killed for making that decision. There was no honour in it, in their account, and calling it an honour killing has let the crime keep a name that explains it away.
His lawyers presented him to the board as a model prisoner who had completed rehabilitation programmes including domestic-violence treatment. The state's representative acknowledged the severity of the crime while noting the change in his conduct. The board found he was no longer dangerous and could be returned to the community in stages, and it recorded that the family opposed the decision.
The count behind the case#
Killings of women in Palestinian society inside Israel have not receded since. The Abraham Initiatives, which monitors crime and policing in Arab communities, recorded 2025 as the deadliest year on the organisation's record, with 252 people killed in Arab society, 23 of them women — the highest number of women it has counted in a single year.
Those two facts sit awkwardly beside one another, and the discomfort is the point. A killing from 2003 is being reopened in a family's living room in the same season a monitoring group is recording the worst annual toll it has ever published.
The women's organisations working in Kafr Qasem and the Triangle have argued for years that early release in cases like this teaches a lesson the community reads clearly, whatever the rehabilitation file says. This week a family in Kafr Qasem read it again.
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