23-Oct-15: Scenes from a stabbing/ramming/shooting war of terror

The "moderate" Abbas in front of poster
of his mentor, the arch-terrorist and Nobel Prize
laureate Yasser Arafat

A month ago, and several weeks before arranging for his wife's brother to be admitted to Israel's best private hospital as a VIP patient ["23-Oct-15: When the people inciting the knifings/rammings/shootings need really good doctors, where do they turn?"], the highly-immoderate "moderate" president of the Palestinian Authority, made some public statements that ignited a firestorm.

"Al-Aksa is ours and so is the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. They [the Jews] have no right to desecrate them with their filthy feet. We won’t allow them to do so and we will do whatever we can to defend Jerusalem... Each drop of blood that was spilled in Jerusalem is pure blood as long as it’s for the sake of Allah. Every shahid (martyr) will be in heaven and every wounded person will be rewarded, by Allah’s will." [Abbas quoted in Jerusalem Post, September 16, 2015]

Thoughts of pure blood, of filthy feet, of heaven and of being rewarded for the spilling of blood have propelled an onslaught of Palestinian Arab savagery against Israelis, overwhelmingly against non-uniformed Israelis and visitors, since Mahmoud Abbas uttered those words.

Some selected scenes from the past 36 hours of this savage war of terror directed at Israelis. (And to be clear - we don't claim to be reporting all the terror attacks; nowhere near it, in fact. There are too many of them in too many parts of our beautiful country, and it's simply depressing to list them in the numbers in which they are happening.)

Irish news report about the "alleged" Beit Shemesh attack on a
Jewish school bus on Thursday morning [Source]

• From this morning (Friday) here in Jerusalem, Times of Israel says police thwarted yet another terror attack directed (as usual) at civilians, this time in Jerusalem’s Nof Zion neighborhood in East Jerusalem. Local residents noticed a suspect surveying homes in the area and called for police help. A Border Police patrol unit soon arrived and stopped the suspect, asking him to show his hands. He he kept his right hand behind his back and refused to show it. When pressed, the report says, he kept it in a fist. An officer "subdued" him, and found a knife concealed in the suspect's sleeve. He turns out to be a 21-year-old male from Jabel Mukaber, a village inside the city limits of Jerusalem, and the source of a considerable flow of hatred-driven terrorism now and in the past. Past mentions in our blog include "16-Sep-15: Jerusalem Watch | Not-so-new New Year violence"; "19-Sep-15: Jerusalem Watch | Yet more rage"; "13-Oct-15: A bloody day and the malevolence behind it"; "17-Oct-15: Bloody Saturday". The vile killers of several rabbis in a synagogue in Jerusalem's Har Nof section came from Jabel Mukaber, and massacre of unarmed men at prayer caused an eruption of celebration there in its immediate aftermath ["26-Dec-14: The ongoing search for Arabic-language outrage at the men with the meat-cleavers and knives"].
• It's October, which is the time for the olive harvest season in our part of the world. The IDF, alert to the tensions that often erupt during the Palestinian Arab olive harvest, provides secure coverage for the picking in selected locations. Ynet says that early this morning (Friday), at one of those spots in the Gush Etzion area a few kilometers south of Jerusalem, a company of IDF soldiers arrived, "as they do every morning during this season, to open the separation barrier near the settlement of Geva'ot to let Palestinian olive farmers cross the barrier and work their olive groves located west of the fence.  After soldiers opened the gate, a Palestinian attacked one of them, a tracker from the Etzion Regional Brigade, and stabbed him in the upper body. His fellow soldiers immediately shot the terrorist in the foot and neutralized him. The terrorist is a 16-year-old from the village of Surif." The assailant who plunged a knife into the soldier's back was shot in the leg and lightly injured. He is now being fixed in Hadassah Ein Karem Medical Center, Jerusalem. His victim is in Jerusalem's Shaarei Zedek Medical Center.
• Thursday afternoon, a Palestinian Arab made an unsuccessful stabbing attack on an IDF soldier close to the Hassam Shoter checkpoint in Hevron's Tel Rumeida neighborhood. He fled and a search failed to find him. The site of the attack was mentioned in a post [here] a few days ago.
• In Beit Shemesh yesterday (Thursday) morning, a terror attack plot that could easily have cost a terribly high price ended up as something less painful, though certainly worrying and with victims. In the Haaretz account, officers at the Beit Shemesh police station received an early morning report that two terror suspects had tried to board a private school bus with young children on board and had been frightened away by the yelling of nearby civilians. Police were sent to the area (according to locals, only after an unreasonable delay) and spotted the suspects just as they launched a stabbing attack on a young man standing at a bus stop on Yehezkel Hanavi Street. The police promptly opened fire in accordance with the new shoot-to-kill rules of engagement when confronting terrorists in the act.  Palestinian Arab sources now say the attackers were Mahmoud Ghanimat and Makdad Heeh, both about 20, both from the village of Tzurif, near Hebron, and both construction workers engaged at a construction site in the rapidly-developing Ramat Beit Shemesh Gimel section of town. Haaretz says: "Under their t-shirts, police found they were wearing a second t-shirt with the emblems of the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades, the military wing of Hamas. The Shin Bet security service said one was a Hamas activist and the other had been imprisoned from 2012 to 2014 after being apprehended with a knife in the area of the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron." One of the attackers died of his wounds; the other is injured and in a bad way. Their victim is described as "a young Haredi man, aged about 18". The police and the municipal authorities are now saying they will increase enforcement of the law regarding the presence of Palestinian Arab workers in the city: "The investigation into the attack will include determining how the two reached Beit Shemesh from the area of the southern Hebron hills, which is considered a prime place where Palestinians illegally enter Israel.  Because of various breaks in the fence in the area, many Palestinians enter Israel there daily.  The regional council has complained about this for a long time, and the daily transit of Palestinians into Israel there is well-known to the security forces, but nothing has been done.  Defense sources estimate that about 34,000 Palestinians illegally enter Israel every day through the various breaks in the fence, not only in the Hebron area."
  Notice the screen shot we posted above, taken from the website of the Irish Independent news site. We think the Palestinian Arabs must occasionally ask themselves what they did right to be on the receiving end of so much undeserved journalistic benevolence by Irish reporters, editors and analysts. It's an ongoing scandalous disgrace.
• In the very early hours of Thursday morning, just after midnight and a block away from Jerusalem's Central Bus Station on Yirmiyahu Street, a Jewish man was shot to death (Haaretz says) after he was suspected of being a terrorist and, according to testimony, tried to snatch a weapon from an Israel Defense Forces soldier. The IDF Spokesman's Unit said it was a soldier that fired at the man, and that "the security services are investigating details of the incident."
• On Wednesday, a young female soldier serving in the Home Front Command's Kedem battalion was severely wounded in a stabbing attack at Adam Junction, on Jerusalem's northern edge. Jerusalem Post says a second female soldier shot and killed the knife attacker. He is identified as Ibrahim Mu'taz Zawiya, 21, from Azarya, near Ma'ale Adumim. An additional suspect was apprehended near the scene. The injured young woman is being treated at Hadassah Ein Karem hospital, and though her injuries were critical at first, she is said to be doing better.

It's an intense and difficult time, with considerable fear in the air, as well as anger and deep resentment at the overt nature of the incitement emanating from the political leadership of the Palestinian Arabs. It's hard for ordinary Israelis to comprehend how the people on the other side - chief among them Mahmoud Abbas, the mis-named "moderate" - show such willingness to weaponize their own children and place them in the front lines of the attacks on mainly-civilian Israeli targets.