Yigal Amir

Yigal Amir (born May 31, 1970) is an Israeli man convicted of murdering Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. The killing occurred on November 4, 1995, at the end of a rally in Tel Aviv that supported the Oslo Accords. At that time, Amir was a law student at Bar-Ilan University. He is currently serving a life sentence for murder, which already includes the charge of wounding Rabin’s bodyguard; additional years were added for other offenses like conspiracy.

Amir grew up in Herzliya, the second of eight children in an Orthodox Yemenite Jewish family. His father worked as a scribe, supervised kosher chicken slaughtering, and taught Shabbat lessons; his mother ran a nursery school from home and was a kindergarten teacher. He attended a religious elementary school and a high school yeshiva in Tel Aviv. According to his mother, he was initially rejected by the yeshiva at age twelve because he was a "dark Yemenite," but he persuaded the staff to admit him. After graduating in 1989, he served 20 months in the Israel Defense Forces as a Hesder student, combining military service in a religious platoon of the Golani Brigade with religious study at Yeshivat Kerem B'Yavneh from 1991 to 1993. Even within his religious unit, fellow soldiers considered him a fanatic.

In early 1993, he obtained a handgun permit by claiming self-defense and listing a false residence in a West Bank settlement. That summer, after finishing at Kerem B'Yavneh, he spent two months teaching Judaism in Riga, Latvia, through the religious-Zionist youth movement Bnei Akiva. Returning to Israel in October 1993, he entered Bar-Ilan University’s kollel program, studying law and Jewish law. He often argued with his rabbis, insisting that Jewish law should override Israeli secular law.

Amir strongly opposed the Oslo Accords. He joined campus protests, organized bus trips to support settlers, helped found an illegal settlement outpost, and led marches in Hebron. He told friends that the commandment "thou shalt not kill" did not apply to Rabin because Rabin had handed over Jewish holy lands to Arabs, thereby blocking the redemption of the Jewish people. During his activism, he became close to Avishai Raviv, a well-known right-wing extremist who was later revealed to be an informant for Shin Bet.