Nearly a decade after a mobile phone video captured an Israeli combat medic shooting a wounded, disarmed Palestinian attacker in the head on a Hebron street, President Isaac Herzog has granted Elor Azaria a full pardon — timed, with deliberate symbolism, to the eve of Yom Kippur. The case had already cleaved Israeli society along fault lines of military loyalty, moral accountability, and the meaning of justice in wartime; the pardon does not heal those fractures so much as formalize where the current leadership stands within them. What endures is the older, harder question: how a nation define
Israeli President Pardons Combat Medic Convicted of Killing Wounded Palestinian
One Palestinian attacker, Abdel Fattah al-Sharif, was shot dead by Azaria; one Israeli soldier was stabbed by al-Sharif.
War & Conflict