Muhammad Harouf, a 29-year-old Palestinian from Nablus, was convicted on Sunday of killing 29-year-old Michal Halimi from the Binyamin region community of Adam in 2017.
Harouf confessed to killing Halimi, with whom he was romantically involved, because she was Jewish. Under the terms of a plea agreement, he will serve a life sentence.
Although Harouf initially denied meeting with Halimi, after her body was found, he confessed to the murder and re-enacted it.
Police initially said the evidence suggested that Halimi's murder was a crime of passion and that Harouf had decided to kill her after she told him she was pregnant to her Israeli husband. But the indictment was ultimately amended to include charges of terrorism.
Under the amended indictment and subsequent plea bargain, Harouf was convicted of killing her "for nationalist reasons" and for being Jewish. According to the indictment, after learning she was pregnant, he arranged to meet her outside the city of Holon in central Israel, where he worked as a gardener. He tried to convince her to move with him to Nablus, but when she refused, he strangled her, hit her with two cinder blocks, stole her car, and fled.
Though she was reported missing in May, her body was only found in August. She was two months' pregnant.
Halimi's family insisted that she was killed because she was Jewish and not because of personal motives. On Sunday, Halimi's mother, Gita Zilberman, said the plea agreement "proves that we were speaking the truth all along."
"Even before the indictment we were sure that this was terrorism and now the court says so. Justice was done," Zilberman said.
