02-Aug-16: Rat poison, bruised religious sensitivities and a July bombing assault in Jerusalem

Scene of the July 17, 2016 attempted bombing outrage in the center of Jerusalem [Image Source]

We reported here a little over two weeks ago ["17-Jul-16: At a Jerusalem corner with a tragic history, a human bomb is intercepted this morning"] about the thwarting of an Arab-on-Israeli bomb attack on a Jerusalem Light Rail stop located a few meters from where our daughter Malki was murdered - with fourteen other people - by Hamas terrorists some years earlier.

Today (Tuesday), key details were revealed about the July attack. Times of Israel says Ali Abu Hassan, a student civil engineering at Hebron University, aged 21, was charged with "attempted murder, creating a weapon and conspiracy to commit a crime". Slipping into Jerusalem via the Arab neighbourhoods of Tsur Baher and Jabel Mukaber, he shaved off his beard and changed into shorts and a T-shirt "to better blend in with the Jerusalem population" and embarked on an act of intended revenge to pay Israel back for the ghastly offense to the religious sensitivities of certain kinds of Muslims: "visits by tourists and Israeli Jews to the Temple Mount”, according to a police statement given to the court.

(We checked. The Hebron University website makes no claims of offering civil engineering courses or indeed courses in any other branch of engineering. In the circumstances, it's a small issue. Perhaps he was actually enrolled in the school's Islamic Studies program - here - and preferred not to say that. Or perhaps we didn't check carefully enough.)

His weapons are worth a few moments' reflection. The alleged assailant:

was armed with three pipe bombs he had linked together into one large explosive and had covered with nails and screws dipped in rat poison. “In his bag there were also two knives and a cellphone,” police said Tuesday. Hassan researched how to make a pipe bomb that would “cause the most, and most effective, damage” on the internet and “even carried out test explosions with a number of bombs in order to check them before entering Israel,” according to a joint Shin Bet-Israel Police investigation.

Rat poison as an element in Palestinian Arab terrorists' arsenal has been pooh-pooh-ed for years by certain kinds of Western commentators (see for instance a July 2002 piece in Slate, entitled "Rat Poison Bombs Revisited: The Middle East story that refuses to die"). For the record, rat poison

...is an especially nasty bio-terror weapon.  Most rat poisons are made up of chemicals called anti-coagulants with trade names like warfarin, fumarin, diphacinone and bromadiolone.  Some also contain poisons such as strychnine. All work more or less the same way. A small mammal eats the poison and soon gets sick and dies from internal hemorrhaging. This happens because a mammalian needs to constantly manufacture coagulants to manage internal body functions.  When the coagulant is blocked, uncontrolled internal bleeding occurs... ["Bio-Terrorism in Israel", Dr Stephen Bryen, December 12, 2001] 

The thwarted bomber is said, according to police testimony at this morning's hearing, to have left what he called a final testament at the university along with a request that this be handed to his parents when the intended savagery was done. He didn't die, but all is not lost. As we noted in our original report:

Assuming he's convicted, [the] thwarted human bomb starts earning Rewards for Terror cash from the Palestinian Authority via its malevolent, ever-so-slightly-disguised prisoner payments authority. The funding all comes from European and American foreign aid to the Palestinian Authority, as government officials of all the relevant countries know well - but in large measure deny. As for the man in underwear in the photo [in our earlier post - the] would-be human bomb, his financial future, and that of his dependents, is suddenly secure... [From our July 17, 2016 post]

We can't help thinking back to the terrorist and her (human) bomb who blew up the Sbarro pizzeria 15 years ago. There are strong similarities in the way Abu Hassan approached his target, according to the Times of Israel account:

On July 17, Hassan took a bus to the center of the capital and walked along Jerusalem’s popular Jaffa Road to find a target for his bombing, before stopping near the intersection with King George Street. According to investigators, he originally intended to attack a restaurant on Jaffa Road and scoped out the area to prepare for his assault. However, when he noticed the large number of passengers boarding the light rail that runs through downtown, Hassan changed his target. When he attempted to board the tram, he was stopped after he raised the suspicions of a security guard. When the guard asked to examine the contents of the bag, he noticed the bomb and called the police.

Our daughter's murderer accompanied the human bomb on a bus and taxi journey into Jerusalem from Ramallah on August 9, 2001. Both were dressed to look like Israelis and fool the security people. Tragically, this worked.

The explosives were packed with thousands of small, nasty black nails, designed to rip through human flesh and to inflict massive injuries on those lucky enough to escape death. Several of those were embedded in the cell phone case that had once been Malki's and that was handed back to us by the police after the massacre.

Once they reached the center of Jerusalem, the female terrorist, a woman of 21 who was the engineer of the massacre on behalf of Hamas, told her bomb, a young man called Al-Masri, to walk to the same intersection where the July 2016 attempt was made and, after waiting several minutes to give her enough time to flee to safety, to explode in the middle of the four-way pedestrian crossing.

But that's not what he did. He, the bomb, evidently realized that more Jewish children were inside the pizzeria than in the intersection. So he kept walking and was standing at the Sbarro pizzeria counter, right next to two pretty teens - our Malki and her friend Michal - when he ignited the explosive package concealed in the guitar case on his back. No quick thinking security man was there that day.

Like the July 17, 2016 bomber, the woman who engineered the Sbarro pizzeria massacre also became a beneficiary of the PA's loathsome Rewards for Terror scheme. She has been living in total freedom in the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan since October 2011. She has received and, we assume, spent many thousands of dollars of funds that originated with gullible taxpayers in the Western countries (including the United States, the United Kingdom, Norway, France, Germany and the European Union). 

It's those payments that make that abominable safety-net for more terror possible.