Last week, a Palestinian man was sentenced to life imprisonment and also given an additional 20 years behind bars for the rape and murder of Israeli teenager Ori Ansbacher in February 2019 in a Jerusalem forest.

Arafat Irfaiya
Image@social media

But more shocking than the first-degree murder, rape and unlawful killing was the convict's deep-rooted, disturbingly extremist, anti-Semitic ideology. Arafat Irfaiya had pleaded guilty to the charges, over the attack on 19-year-old Ansbacher, at the Jerusalem District Court in June 2020.

Irfaiya was smiling when sentenced to a life in prison last week. But it wasn't lack of remorse that was the cause of the smile, it was extreme pride in his act of stabbing a teenager multiple times after raping her.

As per a Channel 12 news report, Irfaiya told interrogators that he entered Israel to look for a Jewish victim so he could be a martyr. The transcript of the interview, as released by the police, and recently shared by a Twitter user Adam Albilya, had generated outrage and shock across the country prompting the government to approve a law under which Israel would deduct from tax revenues, it collects on behalf of Palestinians, the amount that the Palestinian Authority pays out every month to Palestinian attackers and their families.

Irfaiya, "I made my parents very proud by what I did?"
Q: How can murder and rape cause pride?

Irfaiya: I didn't just rape someone, I murdered a Jewish woman. You won't be able to understand it because our thinking is different. If you ask anyone if they would be happy to kill a Jew, you will see that I have done everything that Arabs dream of doing.

Q: Why didn't you just do it a while ago if you so longed for it?
Irfaiya: This is not what Allah planned for me. This murder is the best and most important thing I have done in my life. If she had stayed alive it would have meant that I had failed in what I had planned a failed in the mission, that was the hardest feeling I felt in my life."
His mission was to enter Jerusalem through the forest to kill Jews. He continues, "I wanted to kill multiple Jews and not just one, but when I was there I saw that Allah had sent me the Jewish woman I realised that I had to kill her, this was the fate that Allah summoned me."

Irfaiya further said that he planned to enter some place to wear a kippa so that they would think he was Jewish and to stab as many Jews as possible to kill them. He also said that if he hadn't met the girl on the way, he would have entered Jerusalem to carry out the attack and murder Jews.
He continues, "After I murdered her, I stayed by the body for a while longer, waiting for more Jewish people to come so that I could surprise them and stab them with a knife and kill them."

A hate crime

According to the chargesheet and indictment against Irfaiya, he entered Israel from the West Bank illegally while armed with a knife. He did not plan much of the attack, apart from purchasing a Jewish kippa so he could slip into Israel without drawing attention.
On the day of the crime, Ansbacher who was a volunteer at a youth center in the capital, had gone for a walk on the southern edge of Jerusalem where she encountered Irfaiya by chance.
Irfaiya decided to kill her because she was Jewish. He attacked Ori with violent cruelty, sexually assaulted her, though she tried to fight him off, but he overpowered her and stabbed her with knife multiple times.

Judge Rafi Carmel ruled that Irfaiya pay approximately $72,000 to Ansbacher's family and additional $22,000 to each of her parents and siblings. The Israeli security forces also demolished his home in the West Bank city of Hebron.

The victim had written a poem on peace

In a heart-breaking development after her murder, a poem Ansbacher had written, was found in her notebook. The first line read, "Make your world a world of peace, peace among worlds, peace of the unknown."

 
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