Taysir Hayb was found guilty of shooting Tom Hurndall, 22, a member of the pro-Palestinian International Solidarity Movement. Hurndall died in a London hospital in January 2004 after lying in a coma for nine months.
Human rights groups maintain that Israel has used excessive force to quell Palestinian unrest, and very few cases in which Palestinian civilians have been shot have led to convictions.
Hayb, who the army initially said was a private, shot Hurndall while the activist was helping Palestinian children cross a street to avoid gunfire in the southern Gaza town of Rafah, a hotbed of a Palestinian revolt in territory Israel has occupied since the 1967 Middle East War.
Read the whole article from Reuters as posted on MSN Today for the UK.
Most tragic (to your humble narrator) is the fact that Tom's death is being reported internationally, while human rights groups generally agree that hundreds if not thousands of ordinary Palestinians have been killed by the Israeli government's occupying forces - yet their stories are rarely brought to light.
Tom's family have a website - take a look.
In this humble narrator's opinion, the justifiably scared Israeli government is going too far to apply collective punishment to all Palestinians for the crimes of a few militants.
Justifiable, because when you illegally occupy your neighbour's country for 50+ years, you have to be scared that they'll fight back. When you kill children and innocents for the crimes of a minority of insurgents, you have to expect more resistance, more retaliation. The answer to rebellion is never to oppress the rebelling people, it's to ask Why are they rebelling?
Our media are not helping either - but this news is strangely welcome, if it only raises awareness of the terrible human rights abuses being commited by a nation's government that aspires to be a big player in international politics.
