14-Mar-16: Back-to-back vehicle-ramming attacks in Kiryat Arba this morning

Scene of one of this morning's attacks

A windy, chilly, stormy morning and there have been two vehicle-ramming attacks against Israelis in Kiryat Arba, an Israeli community with a population of about 8,000 on the edge of Hebron.

Today's terror assaults, though unlikely to have much impact in the West, encompass three of the four major weapon groups that have featured in the raging Palestinian Arab violence of the past half year: rammings, knifings and shootings.

Times of Israel says one person was injured in the first when the driver, a Palestinian Arab, "apparently attempted to run over a hitchhiker" shortly before 7:00 am at a hitchhiking post at the Elias Junction outside Kiryat Arba. Soldiers at the scene opened fire on the attackers and hit them. One soldier was lightly hurt by shrapnel.

Weapons were found in the car. According to Jerusalem Post, there were two "would-be assailants" in the vehicle, each equipped with Carl Gustav rifles. That's a name given locally to locally-produced, relatively cheap, widely-available automatic weapons modeled on a standard 9mm submachine gun used by Sweden's military in the twenty years after the end of World War II.

An Israel National News report - and a report on the Rotter social media site - says two Israelis were then injured in a second vehicle-ramming attack very close to the first and very shortly after it. The attacker there is said to have been "neutralized".

The theologically-inspired martyr count, so beloved of the many parties doing the inciting to murder within Palestinian Arab society, will have grown by several more "heroes" this morning. Each such canonization - via the Arabic media (check out the ever-reliable, martyrdom-promoting Ma'an News Agency report that's already leading their news today), via the work of village and mosque preachers and via the disgraceful abuse of political leadership on constant view in Mahmoud Abbas' office - ensures more dead and more suffering on both sides.

It's been barely two hours, and Ma'an's Arabic-language report already identifies today's thwarted terrorists this way:

The martyrs are: Kasim Farid Abu Odeh Jaber from Hebron, Amir Fouad Junaidi of Hebron, Mustafa Yusuf Taraarh 18 years of the town of Bani Naim.

For self-evident reasons, Ma'an's English-language report can be expected to demurely skip the "martyr" labeling when it eventually appears. But they will surely more than make up for that by the obsessive use of "alleged" in describing what their deceased "heroes" were doing just prior to the explosive violence that abbreviated their lives.

UPDATE: Here's what Reuters is reporting now [9:00 am Monday]:

Three Palestinians attack Israeli troops in West Bank, shot dead: army
Kiryat Arba, West Bank: Three Palestinians carried out back-to-back gun and car-ramming attacks on Israelis near a Jewish settlement in the occupied West Bank on Monday and were shot dead by the army, it said. Two of the Palestinians, armed with a handgun and an improvised machine-pistol, were killed after opening fire on a bus stop at the entrance to Kiryat Arba, the army said. A soldier was wounded in that incident. Minutes later, the third Palestinian rammed a car into an army vehicle at the scene and was shot, the army said. Two soldiers were hurt in the second incident, the army said, adding that two knives were found on the motorist's body.