Tom Hurndall killer released

Anyone familiar with Israeli concepts of justice will be depressed but unsurprised to hear - from a report in Ha'aretz earlier this week - that the soldier who shot peace activist and former MMU student Tom Hurndall is to be released before his sentence is up. Taysir Heib was sentenced to eight years in jail for manslaughter in 2005, so he has been released 3 years early, on the orders of an Army committee acting against official legal positions. The Israeli military's culture of impunity strikes again.
It's rare for Israeli soldiers to be prosecuted or even disciplined for killing or wounding unarmed people, even in the very few cases when those killed are international activists, rather than Palestinians. This week a not-atypical sequence of stories appeared in Ha'aretz, an earlier one stating that a Palestinian shot dead while trying to break into the Barkan settlement in the West Bank was "apparently armed," while an update today revealed that a preliminary enquiry showed that actually, he was unarmed. Guess which version will get quoted by Israel's supporters, and which will vanish down the memory hole? I can't give a link to the second version as it only appeared on the 'breaking news' feed. Will it even get a full story?
It is likely that one of the reasons that a soldier was even convicted for Tom Hurndall's death is that the man who fired the shot was Bedouin, and therefore subject to routine racism in Israeli society anyway.
The Hurndall family have expressed their anger and distress at the move, which they heard about from the British FCO, not the Israelis, but Tom Hurndall's sister commented that it was the Israeli system they were concerned about, not the fate of an individual soldier who they extended compassion to. The family have previously been openly critical about the lack of support they received from 'Middle East Peace Envoy' (WTF? I mean, really) Tony Blair while he was still Prime Minister.