04-Mar-16: This morning's Arab-on-Israeli vehicle-ramming attack: the Arabic media version

From the scene of this morning's terror attack [Source: Twitter]

The Arab media are reporting this morning's latest Gush Etzion attack on Israelis in customary fashion.

Quoting the PA's Ministry of Health, the driver of the attack vehicle, in which a knife was found resting on the dashboard, is described by the Palestinian Arab Ma'an News Agency's English-language report as

34-year-old Amani Husni Sabatin from the nearby village of Husan in western Bethlehem. The head of Husan's village council, Hasan Hamamreh, told Ma'an that Israeli forces had sealed the eastern and western entrances of the village following Sabatin's death. He rejected the army's allegations that she had attempted to carry out an attack, saying her death was an "obvious execution" that continues Israel's crimes and violations against Palestinians. Hamamreh said Sabatin was married and the mother of four children, the eldest of whom is a 14-year-old daughter. Her husband works in Israel.

The husband's place of work might explain the car's yellow license plates. (And Palestinian Information Center's Twitter feed reports she is a mother of five.)

Ma'an usually resorts to boiler-plate reportage in its English-language edition when covering the extreme violence of the past five months of Arab-on-Israeli attacks. Today is no exception, via an article headlined "Palestinian woman shot dead after alleged car attack at Gush Etzion":

The Gush Etzion junction -- the entrance point to the illegal Gush Etzion settlement bloc -- has seen numerous deadly encounters since a surge of violence shook the occupied Palestinian territory at the beginning of October last year... While Israel alleges many of those were attempting to attack Israelis when they were shot, Palestinians and rights groups have disputed Israel's version of events in a number of cases.

The Ma'an editors are customarily less restrained in their Arabic-language articles. In today's edition, the response of the armed IDF soldiers guarding pedestrian and vehicle traffic round the clock in the frequently-targeted Etzion Junction is described in an article headed "Occupation executes mother of four". The attempted killer, as expected, is called a "martyr" not only here but right across the Arabic social media this afternoon. Images are posted widely (here, for instance) showing the dead woman's bewildered-looking children holding a portrait of their mother.