28-Dec-17: At a northern Jerusalem security checkpoint, a girl with knives and stabbing victims on her mind

Qalandiya Crossing and some of its security personnel who watch for
attackers [Image Source]

Barely noticed by reporters and overwhelmingly ignored by mainstream news editors, there has been a non-lethal security incident at one of the main entry points through which Palestinian Arabs pass on their way into Israel's capital city, Jerusalem.

But non-lethal was not the goal of the attacker.

A Palestinian teen was arrested Wednesday after trying to illegally enter Israel and allegedly carry out a terror attack, police said. The suspect, an 18-year-old female, was turned away at the Qalandiya crossing near Jerusalem, and later tried to cross again using her 7-year-old sister’s permit. When she was refused, she began arguing with border guards and tried to force her way in, a police spokesperson said. During subsequent questioning, the teen admitted to planning an attack in the Jerusalem area. A source with knowledge of the case told The Times of Israel that the Palestinian planned to buy a knife and stab a police officer. The woman, from the town of Qataneh, was jailed, pending a remand hearing. Her name was not released by police... ["Palestinian teen caught planning stabbing attack — police", Times of Israel, December 27, 2017]

You might want to note how:

• The terror-minded suspect is about the same age as the young woman from Nabi Saleh of whom we wrote earlier this week ["24-Dec-17: Nabi Saleh, the media and a Tamimi child's journey"]. "Girls" of seventeen or eighteen are older, often by several years, than a steady stream of Palestinian Arab teens who have perpetrated (or been thwarted trying) terrorist Arab-on-Israeli attacks during the past two years. [Click on "Weaponizing Children" for dozens such recent cases.]
• News about Jerusalem gets remarkably uneven coverage in the mainstream news industry. The decision of the Trump Administration to recognize that Israel's capital city for the past seventy years has been Jerusalem got vastly more coverage, even though no one's life was directly threatened by it.
• In Qataneh (sometimes written Qatane), from where yesterday's would-be attacker lived, Israeli forces two years ago uncovered a massive weapons cache that included ammunition, knives, IDF uniforms and binoculars [source]. The village is located right next to the Israeli community of Har Adar, 12 km north of Jerusalem. The neighborhood has been in the news recently for the worst kind of reasons ["26-Sep-17: At Har Adar's entrance, an Arab-on-Israeli shooter with problems and a solution"] 
• The security personnel who man the Qalandiya Crossing have realistic expectations by now of what some Palestinian Arabs, and in particular children, have on their minds. Consider for instance events that took place there just a few months back: "20-May-17: A child, a knife and another thwarted stabbing today on Jerusalem's northern edge". That attack-child was 14.

Over at Israel National News, their report of Wednesday's thwarted attack includes this rather poignant additional commentary:

The police said that "the soldiers and policemen work throughout the year at the crossings around the Jerusalem area and in their activities constitute human shields for the residents [of the city], prevent the entry of unauthorized persons into Israel and the smuggling of weapons. This is all in order to protect the residents of the State of Israel."

We can relate to this.

On the day our 15 year-old daughter Malki and 14 other innocents were murdered in the Hamas attack on Jerusalem's Sbarro pizzeria, the terrorist bomber and her human bomb passed through this same security crossing, Qalandiya. Tragically, no one thought to stop and interrogate the young man with the guitar case slung across his back that afternoon. In those simpler times, we didn't know our neighbours included people with the monstrous capacity to conceal a massively-explosive, shrapnel-packed weapon-of-mass-destruction inside a musical instrument container and then go looking for Jewish children to kill and maim.

Ahed Tamimi, the woman from Nabi Saleh now being called "girl" in much of the heavy media coverage, danced at the wedding of her cousin, the Sbarro massacre mastermind. Like other members of the Tamimi clan, she identifies with the achievement of the convicted-murderer and celebrates the deed and the doer.