The defense asks the Hebrew foreign and defense ministers to recant for having accused it of belonging to a terrorist organization
“We already have a final date for a nightmare, the wait for these months has been agonizing,” were the words of María Rismawi at the doors of the Ofer prison room in which the sentence on the case of his mother, the Spanish aid worker Juana Ruiz. The Israeli military justice accepts the agreement reached last week by the Prosecutor’s Office and the defense and sentences the Spanish humanitarian worker to thirteen months in prison, of which she has already served seven, and a fine of 14,000 euros, for the crimes of belonging to illegal association and foreign exchange trafficking in the West Bank. With the sentence now final, the defense led by lawyer Avigdor Feldman will now request the provisional release of his client.
The agreement between the prosecution and defense was key since in the military justice system applied by Israel in the Palestinian territories, 99% of the accused are sentenced. Juana agreed to plead guilty to providing services to the Health Work Committees (HWC), a health organization with which she had been working for three decades and which continues to operate in the West Bank, and to “receiving money and smuggling it into the West Bank”, but the ruling clarifies that He did not acknowledge at any time having collaborated with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), a group considered terrorist by Israel, the United States and the European Union.
The judge also dissociated the case of the Spanish aid worker with that of the six Palestinian human rights organizations declared “terrorists” by Israel, a complete setback for the Foreign Ministers, Yair Lapid, and Defense, Benny Gantz, who after learning of the agreement Between the defense of the Spanish and the prosecution, last week they lied by assuring that Juana Ruiz “admitted to having raised funds for the PFLP” and confessed that these NGOs functioned “as her cover.”
Feldman declared after the end of the reading of the sentence that “it has become clear that what the ministers said is totally false and we ask them to withdraw because my client did not collect money for the PFLP and had no connection whatsoever with those six organizations such as and as they said ».
Juana, a native of Madrid, was arrested by the Hebrew Army on April 13 at her home in Beit Sahour, south of Bethlehem. The humanitarian worker has lived in Palestine for 35 years, is married, the mother of two children and worked as a Project Coordinator for the HWC organization.
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