Monday, April 24, 2017

24-Apr-17: At Qalandiya Crossing, a woman stabber attacked an Israeli official this morning

The alleged stabber
[Credit]
Yet another Arab-on-Israeli stabbing attack today. This one, around 6:45 Monday morning at the busy Qalandiya security checkpoint close to Ramallah and to Jerusalem's northern suburbs, involves the sort of malice aforethought that is endemic among our neighbours.

First, about the victim: she's an Israeli woman of 28, an employee of the Ministry of Defense’s Civil Administration. Ynet says she was rushed by ambulance to Hadassah Medical Center in Ein Kerem, Jerusalem, to be treated for a shoulder stab wound after being attacked by an assailant armed with a knife.

The attacker, also a female, is uninjured even though she was stopped and apprehended. This, perhaps surprisingly, is not surprising. For all the bad publicity Israeli security personnel often get, in reality they take an amazing amount of care to minimize harm to those they are called upon to neutralize, even at the risk of physical harm - or worse - to themselves.

The attacker is
Asya Kaabana, 41, who lives in the Shechem (Nablus) area town of Duma, the Shin Bet security agency reported. Kaabana is married and a mother of nine children, and recently has had difficulties in her marriage, with her husband threatening to send her back to her family in Jordan. The Shin Bet also discovered that the terrorist fought with her husband on Sunday night over their children's education. This argument caused the woman to decide to carry out a terror attack, in the hopes Israeli security forces would shoot her, since, "she was sick of her life anyway"... [Israel National News]
According to a police spokesperson, she
The attacker's weapon [Image Source:
Israel Police]
came to the Qalandiya checkpoint... While waiting in line to be checked, the terrorist approached a female security officer, claiming to have a question she needed to ask her. At this point she apparently drew a knife that was in her purse and quickly approached the female security officer and stabbed her. Police and security guards that were on the scene overpowered her and neutralized her... [a different Israel National News report]
Duma, where the knifer lives, is the village where an Arab home was destroyed by fire in mid-2015, causing the deaths of three members of one family, the Dawabshas. Charges in connection with that fire and the deaths were brought against an Israeli adult and a minor in January 2016. But no convictions have yet been entered. A vague Wikipedia reference [here] says various media accounts have "attributed the wave of stabbing attacks by Palestinians from late 2015 through 2016 at least partly to the Duma arson killings as well as Israeli delays in pressing charges against any suspects". Could today's attack be part of the "revenge" campaign?

Over at the Ma'an News Agency site, they name the attacker as Asiya Kaabna, calling her a resident of the village of "Tayba", near Ramallah. Taybeh (a better spelling) is considered the last remaining all-Christian community under Palestinian Authority control, so - given that stabbing attacks by Christian are quite unusual - we doubt they have the facts right.

A not-so-minor side issue: if today's knife-woman is convicted by an Israeli court of a terrorism offense, those nine children at home, as well as the husband with whom she fought last night, are likely to benefit financially. 

That's thanks to the notorious Palestinian Authority "Rewards for Terror" scheme. It's been going for quite some years [see "28-Jul-11: Taxpayer-funded salaries to convicted Palestinian Arab terrorists. What a good idea."], it still plays a huge role in maintaining the extraordinarily high levels of Arab-on-Israeli violence [see "28-Mar-17: The US can end the Palestinian Arab bureaucracy of terror"] and while there's talk of curbing its lethal impact ["01-Mar-17: Washington may be launching a long-overdue assault on Abbas' lethal Rewards for Terror scheme"], it keeps showing tremendous endurance ["29-Jan-17: What's the exchange rate for American dollars into Palestinian Arab terror killings?"].

1 comment:

Etty said...

It's good they didn't shoot her. That way she doesn't become a martyr or "heroine" and she deserves her miserable life anyway.