The attack on Jerusalem Pride
She marched for her friends: how an attack on Jerusalem Pride in 2015 ended in death.
On 30 July 2015, the annual Pride parade made its way through the centre of Jerusalem: music, Israeli flags, rainbow flags and around 5,000 participants, accompanied by a large police presence. In the middle of the march, a man in the black clothing of ultra-Orthodox Jews pulled a long knife from under his coat and stabbed the marchers until a police officer brought him to the ground. Several people were injured, among them the 16-year-old schoolgirl Shira Banki. She died in hospital three days later. Her family donated her organs and said that Shira had been killed because she had come to support her friends' right to live their lives as they chose.
The attacker, Yishai Schlissel, was no stranger. Ten years earlier he had stabbed people at the same parade and had served a ten-year prison sentence for it. He was released a few weeks before the attack and distributed a handwritten pamphlet in which he called the march an abomination and announced resistance. On the day of the parade, police officers at first turned him away; he got back to the route through side streets.
In April 2016, the Jerusalem District Court convicted him of murder and multiple attempted murder, and in June he was sentenced to life imprisonment plus 31 years. The judges noted his lack of remorse and sharply criticised the police: the lessons of the 2005 attack had not been learned, the signs had been legible, but no one had read them. An internal inquiry recommended that several senior police officers be removed from their posts.
Jerusalem has since written the girl's name into its city map: the central Zion Square, near the scene of the crime, was renamed "Tolerance Square". The Pride parade continues to take place every year.