Palestinian teenager, Ahed Tamimi, has accepted a plea deal on Wednesday under which she will be sentenced to eight months in prison, her lawyer said.
Tamimi has been hailed as a hero for slapping an Israeli soldier, an incident which was caught on video and which ultimately led to her arrest.
The December 15 incident outside her home in the village of Nabi Saleh was streamed live on Facebook by her mother and went viral.
The soldiers had deployed during a weekly Palestinian protest in the village against Israeli policy on settlements in the West Bank, one of the most heated issues in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Tamimi’s attorney Gaby Lasky said the deal has yet to be presented to the court in Ofer military prison near the West Bank city of Ramallah.
Tamimi was 16 at the time of the offence. Her trial began last month and she faced 12 charges, including aggravated assault.
Lasky said that under the plea agreement, Tamimi would plead guilty to a reduced charge sheet and would be sentenced to eight months in jail. Tamimi's sentence in the agreement includes time served and a fine of 5,000 shekels ($1,430, 1,166 euros), meaning she is to be released in the summer.
She accepted to plead guilty to four of the 12 charges against her under the agreement, including assault, incitement and two counts of obstructing soldiers, Lasky said.
Tamimi told reporters on Wednesday before the court accepted the agreement that "there is no justice under occupation and this is an illegitimate court."
Tamimi’s mother, Nariman, and a cousin were also arrested. Both have accepted plea bargains, a family lawyer said.
The case drew global attention. Amnesty International called Tamimi the “Rosa Parks of Palestine”, and the small courtroom was often packed with journalists, diplomats and international observers during hearings, in which Tamimi was led into court in shackles.
A group of American cultural figures, including actors Danny Glover and Rosario Dawson and novelist Alice Walker, signed a petition calling for her release and comparing her case to those of “the children of immigrants and communities of color who face police brutality in the United States”.
The incident prompted criticism from right-wing Israelis that the military looked weak by allowing the teenager to strike a soldier and an officer with impunity.
The army said the soldier “acted professionally” by showing restraint.
“When the European people see my daughter, blonde and blue-eyed, they are shaken, because they saw their children in front of them. It broke the stereotyped image of the Palestinian in the international community,” Tamimi’s father, Bassem Tamimi told Reuters.
Tamimi's trial began on February 13 behind closed doors at the Israeli military court in the West Bank.
Lasky appealed to have the trial opened, but was rejected.
The court ordered the trial closed because Ahed was being tried as a minor, as is usual in such cases.
"When they decided to keep her trial behind closed doors, we knew that we were not going to get a fair trial," Lasky told AFP in describing her reasons for seeking a plea bargain.
The UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights has criticized Israeli authorities' actions in the case, while the European Union has expressed concern over Israel's detention of minors, including Tamimi.
"Ahed will be home in a few months, but Israel is putting this child behind bars for eight months for calling for protests and slapping a soldier, after threatening her with years in jail," Sarah Leah Whitson, executive director of the Middle East division of Human Rights Watch, said in a statement.
