A Tel Aviv court has sentenced an Israeli Arab man to 16 years in prison in the so-called "honor killing" of his sister after several female relatives took the rare step of testifying against him.

Hamda Abu Ghanem was the ninth woman in the clan killed in recent years by male family members. She was shot in January 2007 as she slept at her parents' home in a Muslim neighborhood of Ramla, a mixed Jewish-Arab town of 65,000 in central Israel.

"Honor killings" refer to the murders of women by relatives for allegedly sullying the family name, usually because of sexual misdeeds.

Incriminating evidence against the brother, Kamil Abu Ghanem, included an account by an aunt who said she saw him enter the family home, heard shots and then saw him flee the area. Gunpowder was also found on the clothes he wore that day, according to court documents.

The aunt's identity has not been made public because of fear for her safety. Although she gave a statement to police, the aunt disappeared before she could testify.

In a plea bargain approved by the Tel Aviv District Court this week, Abu Ghanem was convicted of being an accessory to murder, maintaining that he only let someone else into the building to kill his sister, said his lawyer, Giora Zilbershtein.

His mother and another sister were among those who testified against him.

"I am the mother of a murdered woman and her murderer," the mother, Imameh, told an Arabic newspaper.

The clan is well known in Ramla. One cousin, Reem, was drugged by a brother and thrown in a well after refusing to marry the man her family chose, relatives said. Reem's mother, Nayfa, was stabbed to death. Another woman "slipped" in the bathroom and died of her injuries. Others were gunned down or stabbed to death.

Activists for Arab women's rights accused Israeli police of not doing enough to stop the "honor killings," saying they accepted the murders as a part of Muslim culture. Only Kamil Abu Ghanem and one other man have been convicted in the nine Abu Ghanem murders over the past 11 years. Police say the clan destroyed evidence and lied to protect the killers.

Hamda Abu Ghanem's older sister, Sahar, is one of the relatives who have begun speaking out at the risk of her own life. She fled to a secret location with her six children days after Hamda died.

"I want to break this wall of silence, I want to stop honor killings," Sahar told The Associated Press in a telephone interview last year. "Hamda died for nothing. She was honorable. The people who killed her have no honor."