The Central District Court in Lod sentenced Moshe Atias on Thursday to life in prison, plus two additional years consecutively, after convicting him of murdering his partner and mother of their three children, Sigalit Bracha Atias, 54, under aggravated circumstances. The court also ordered him to pay the family the maximum statutory compensation, 258,000 shekels, to be divided among her children, parents and five siblings.
According to the verdict, the couple had been married for many years, divorced in 2000, and still lived together in their home on HaNasi Street in Lod with their three adult children. The judges said Atias had deliberately decided to kill her after careful consideration. On February 12, 2023, at about 5:37 a.m., while she was in bed, he struck her with a 5-kilogram weight, then went to the kitchen, took a knife, returned to the bedroom and stabbed her several times to make sure she was dead. Medical teams pronounced her dead at the scene.
The court said that after the murder Atias washed his hands, made coffee, left the house and got into his black Tesla. A few minutes later he called Magen David Adom and said, “I killed my wife.” When police and rescue forces arrived, he did not surrender. At about 5:52 a.m. he parked near the house, reclined the driver’s seat and hid below the window line. When officer Mark Svitkin approached, Atias accelerated toward him, forcing the officer to dive and roll on the road. He then drove about another 100 meters and crashed into a Border Police vehicle, which in turn hit an ambulance. No one was injured, but he was also convicted of endangering human life on a transport route.
Atias admitted the acts but claimed he suffered from a mental disorder that impaired his grasp of reality. The court rejected that argument, saying he was not close to a psychotic state and could understand and avoid what he did. The judges described him as intelligent, sharp and calculating, and said he acted out of obsessive jealousy and could not accept Sigalit leaving him.
His defense asked the court to avoid the mandatory life sentence and to skip extra punishment for the escape attempt, citing his age, lack of a criminal record and his call to emergency services. Prosecutors, led by attorney Einat Lev Ari, called the killing “cruel and planned” in a home that should have been a safe place, and asked for separate punishment for the dangerous flight from police. The family’s lawyers said the ruling brought justice after a three-year ordeal and that the family would now focus on mourning and commemorating Sigalit.
