A military court today convicted a former Israeli soldier of manslaughter for shooting dead a British peace activist, the first time that a soldier has been found guilty of killing a foreign citizen during the four-year Palestinian uprising.

Wahid Taysir, a former sergeant, was accused of shooting Tom Hurndall in the head during an army operation in the Gaza Strip in April 2003. Witnesses said that Hurndall, 22, was helping Palestinian children avoid Israeli tanks.

The student lay in a comatose state for nine months before he died in a London hospital. Taysir’s lawyers claimed Hurndall did not die directly from his wounds, but because of negligent treatment of Hurndall by doctors in Britain. Taysir, a member of Israel’s Bedouin Arab minority, also accused the court of racism.

In its ruling, the three-judge panel said there was no basis for the malpractice claim. The court found that Taysir had shot Hurndall with a sniper rifle using a telescopic sight, and said that the marksman had given a "confused and even pathetic" version of events.

The court referred to a confession by Taysir, in which he said he wanted to teach Hurndall a lesson for entering a forbidden area. Taysir admitted to aiming a bullet 4in (10cm) to the left of the activist’s head to frighten him, but inadvertently struck him.

"From that moment, Sergeant Taysir began a broad campaign of lies and falsehoods to throw off the expected investigation and to remove any criminal guilt from himself." wrote Colonel Nir Avraham, the panel’s head judge.

Taysir also was convicted of obstruction of justice, submitting false testimony, obtaining false testimony and unbecoming behaviour. He faces up to 20 years in prison when he is sentenced in mid-August.

Hurndall’s sister, Sophie, praised the verdict, but said the army must change its practices. "This kind of thing needs to stop happening. Until that has changed ...we won’t really have won," she told Sky News.

Their father, Anthony Hurndall, said that the verdict "amounts to a limited justice." Mr Hurndall, who was accompanied by British diplomats to hear the verdict, said: "Despite our requests, we have not seen all the evidence, and we believe this may go much further up the chain."

Karine Loevy, a lawyer for the Hurndall family, welcomed the fact that the soldier was convicted on all counts, but added: "From the beginning there was a long time when the army did not give real answers to the family, and the family had a very hard job to collect the evidence themselves and hand it over to the authorities.

"It took a long time before the army was really ready to go and make a very thorough police investigation of the events, even though the facts were very clear, and the evidence given by the soldier was very doubtful from the beginning."

The defence argued that Taysir’s confession was forced. Taysir also said he was prosecuted because he is an Arab and because his victim was a foreigner. "We already believe that there are serious grounds for appeal," said Ilan Bombach, a defence lawyer. Taysir, wearing a black T-shirt and jeans, sat silently throughout the hour-long reading of the judgment.

Taleb al-Sana, a Bedouin member of the Israeli parliament, said that the army had intentionally chosen an easy target to divert attention from its own wrongdoings. "It is easier to throw garbage on someone who is different and thereby cleanse the establishment," Mr al-Sana said.

Hurndall, a student at Manchester Metropolitan University, was shot in the Rafah refugee camp, a regular Israeli-Palestinian flashpoint, where he was photographing the work of the International Solidarity Movement. ISM activists often place themselves between Israeli forces and Palestinians to try to stop the Israeli military from carrying out operations.

In March 2003, Rachel Corrie, 23, an ISM activist from Olympia, Washington, was crushed to death by an Israeli army bulldozer in a Gaza refugee camp while trying to stop soldiers from demolishing a house. Her death was ruled accidental.

Two other British citizens have been killed in the current round of Israeli-Palestinian fighting, which erupted in September 2000. The British cameraman James Miller was shot and killed in Rafah on May 2003 while filming a documentary about the impact of violence on children.

Also, Israeli soldiers shot and killed an aid worker, Iain Hook, in November 2002 during a gunbattle with armed Palestinians in the Jenin refugee camp in the West Bank.

However, in the more than four years of Israeli-Palestinian violence, the Israeli military has arrested only a handful of soldiers for harming Palestinians or foreigners. Another soldier, Aymad Atawna, has already been sentenced to jail for lying to protect Taysir.

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