Raanana terrorists sentenced to life plus 60 years

Cousins Ahmed and Mahmoud Zidat murdered a woman and injured over two dozen people in combined ramming and stabbing attacks.

By Batya Jerenberg, World Israel News

A pair of Palestinian terrorists were sentenced on Tuesday to life in prison plus 60 years for an attack they carried out in January 2024 in Raanana in central Israel during which they murdered an elderly woman and injured over two dozen other people.

Cousins Ahmed (24) and Mahmoud Zidat (44) were convicted in July of carrying out multiple acts of terrorism and serious damage under aggravated circumstances in connection with the attack.

The pair had stolen two vehicles from the car wash Ahmed worked at and split up to cause as many deaths and injuries in the city as possible.

Ahmed first rammed into a pedestrian, seriously injuring him before crashing into another car. He subsequently stole another one after threatening its female driver with a knife.

He ran over two more victims and left the car to stab one of them. When his knife broke, he fled on foot.

In the meantime, Mahmoud plowed at high speed into a group of pedestrians at a bus stop on the other side of Raanana and crashed into the structure, injuring 18, four of them seriously, and killing 79-year-old Edna Bluestein, a social worker .

He also tried to run away on foot, but was captured a short time later by security forces, who also caught his cousin.

When reading out their sentence, the judges noted that their motivation was linked directly to the war Israel was, and still is, fighting in the Gaza Strip.

“The defendants acted out of a desire to take part in the Hamas war,” the judges said, which had been sparked three months earlier after the Gaza terrorist organization led an invasion of Israel in which they murdered 1,200 men, women and children.

They had acted “out of terrible hatred for Israel and the desire to identify with the October 7 attack, while Israel was still mourning its dead and concerned for its hostages,” the justices said.

The judges also ordered them to pay NIS2.3 million in compensation to their victims and Bluestein’s family.

The Zidats, who come from a village near Hebron and worked in Israel illegally, were also convicted of two planned attacks they did not manage to carry out.

One was to be an ambush of security forces in Judea and Samaria in late October 2023, when they equipped themselves with knives and an axe.

Two months later, Ahmed plotted to assassinate the IDF’s Arabic-language spokesman , Lt. Col. Avichay Adraee.

By chance, he had seen Adraee in a Raanana restaurant. He followed him around, wanting to kill him, but had no weapon handy. He returned to the same eatery several times in hopes of seeing Adraee, this time with a knife in hand, but never found him.