Herzog wipes Elor Azaria’s record clean on the Saturday night before Yom Kippur

On the evening of Saturday 19 September, President Isaac Herzog signed an order shortening to zero the remaining expungement period on the criminal record of Elor Azaria, the former IDF soldier convicted of manslaughter for shooting Abdel Fattah al-Sharif, an already-incapacitated Palestinian assailant, in Hebron in March 2016. Azaria was convicted by a military court in 2017 and sentenced to 18 months, reduced to 14 on appeal; Al Jazeera reports he was released in May 2018 after serving nine months. The President’s Residence said Herzog “accepted Defense Minister Israel Katz’s recommendation to immediately shorten the period of Elor Azaria’s criminal record,” a recommendation submitted in July 2026. Haaretz security correspondent Yaniv Kubovich, filing at 8:01 pm local time, reported that Herzog acted despite objections from the military. i24NEWS reports Azaria stated in his request that he did not intend to reopen the case.

The framing from the President’s Office is religious and restorative rather than legal. “After many long years in which Azaria bore the consequences of his actions,” the statement carried by the Jerusalem Post reads, “the president believes that the circumstances as a whole, the passage of time, and the regret he expressed justify allowing him to open a new chapter in his life. This decision was made in the spirit of these days as well, and out of a belief in the importance of repair, reconciliation and the ability to move forward.” A separate statement to i24NEWS insists Herzog “views the military justice system as an essential means of upholding the rule of law, the IDF’s values and principles, and particularly the principle of purity of arms,” and that “the institution of pardon is an act of mercy, not an appeals court.” JFeed noted the order was signed on a Saturday night, framed around the Days of Awe and the eve of Yom Kippur.

Assessment: Read the two presidential statements against each other and the design becomes visible: one paragraph honours the military justice system in the abstract, the next dissolves its most contested verdict in practice, and the Days of Awe supply a vocabulary — repair, reconciliation — that makes the second read as grace rather than reversal. Note what the office did not claim: not that the conviction was wrong, only that enough time has passed. Note also the handling downstream. The Jerusalem Post snippet dates the start of Azaria’s prison term to August 2024, which cannot sit alongside a May 2018 release; it is almost certainly a typo for 2017, and it is the kind of error that survives in this file because few readers check. Treat the Katz reaction as unpublished until the full sentence surfaces.