The United States Department of Justice announced on Thursday that it would seek the prosecution of two Palestinians for the killing of an American national.

Ayad Fatafta and Kifah Ghanimat are being charged in the December 2010 murder of Kristine Luken. According to an affidavit filed in the case, “Fatafta and Ghanimat stabbed to death Ms. Luken, a 44-year old U.S. national who was hiking near an archaeological site while visiting Israel. She died at the scene,” the DoJ statement said.

Fatafta and Ghanimat were later convicted in an Israeli court of murdering Luken and a friend who was hiking with her and survived, the Associated Press reported. Fatafta was sentenced to life in prison plus twenty years, and Ghanimat was sentenced to two life terms prison plus 60 years for the attack and a second crime.

According to court documents, Ghanimat told Israeli authorities “that they were going to kill every Jewish person that they met.” Though Luken was a Christian missionary, her friend Kay Wilson is a Jewish, British-born Israeli who was wearing a Star of David at the time of the attack.

Luken’s step-mother, Meg Luken, told the AP that the family was “very encouraged” by the filing of charges in the case.

Both Fatfata and Ghanimat are serving their prison sentences in Israel. The American charges could be significant if either are freed in a future prisoner exchange.

The DoJ issued an extradition request last month to Jordan for Ahlam Tamimi, who was convicted in the 2001 Sbarro Pizza bombing in Jerusalem. Two of those killed in the attack, Malka Roth and Shoshana Yehudit (Judy) Greenbaum, were American citizens. Tamimi was released in a 2011 prisoner exchange to free Israeli solider Gilad Shalit from Hamas and was deported to Jordan.

https://twitter.com/kishkushkay/status/852748352106004485

In The Terror Within: A Survivor’s Tale, published in the July 2014 issue of The Tower Magazine, Wilson recounted the harrowing moments when she thought that she would be slaughtered alongside her friend.

Held captive to depravity I knelt, gagged and bound, and waited to be beheaded. I remember the fusion of the fragrant pines and the stench of bile trapped under the rag around my mouth. I remember hearing the songs of the birds and the terrified whimper of my friend. I remember a bright light; a machete glinting in the sun. Beauty and the beast, sanctity and savagery were the unfathomable backdrop of those moments, an eternal epoch that has not allowed, like other memories, for normative absorption with the passing of time.

I had never contemplated being brutally murdered. Who does? At only forty-six years old even death had barely crossed my mind. It was half an hour of madness so debilitating that even the moments necessary for preparing myself for death were strangled by the dread of the manner of my imminent execution. I recall looking to Heaven and begging the sun not to set, and seconds later witnessing the unthinkable: A human being hacked to death before my very eyes.

Wilson was stabbed by her attackers 13 times, and survived by pretending to be dead before walking more than a kilometer to get help.

[Photo: Security Camera / YouTube ]