20-Apr-19: At Tapuah Junction, a stabbing attacker is thwarted

Here in Israel, we have just completed the first day of the week-long Pesach festival. It was also the Sabbath. But Arab-on-Israeli terrorism doesn't take holidays.

Haaretz reported this morning on a thwarted attack:

Israeli security forces shot and wounded a Palestinian man on Saturday attempting to carry out a stabbing attack in the West Bank, Border Police said, reporting no further wounded in the incident.
A 20-year-old resident of Saniriya, a village in the northern West Bank, approached a Border Police outpost at the Tapuah Junction and "behaved suspiciously," according to the Israel Police spokesperson.
According to the statement, policemen began pursuing the suspect on foot. Another policeman driving nearby spotted the chase and blocked the suspect with his car.
The suspect then pulled out a knife and tried opening the car door in an attempt to stab the policeman inside, who then shot and wounded him, said the statement.
It was initially reported the suspect had died at the scene. However, he was evacuated in critical condition by the Israeli army for medical attention.

Saniriya is an Arab village of roughly 3,000 people located in Samaria. Times of Israel says the attacker was taken to Beilinson Hospital in Petah Tikva for emergency treatment. Beilinson is a major Israeli medical facility, part of the world-renowned Rabin Medical Center.

The European-funded Maan News Agency reporting from Bethlehem doesn't actually dispute any of what Haaretz reports. Instead it adopts its traditional disingenuous tone (in the English-language version - there's no Arabic report at this hour) according to which Israeli forces injured "a Palestinian who was passing by the checkpoint... claiming that he attempted to carry out a stabbing attack against Israeli soldiers deployed at the Zaatara checkpoint south of the northern occupied West Bank district of Nablus".

So: just another innocent Palestinian Arab passer-by mugged by Israeli reality. Here's a photo of the knife he was clutching.

The checkpoint that Ma'an's editors call Zaatara is better known as Tapuah Junction, site of many previous Arab-on-Israeli attacks (click to view some of our previous Tapuah posts).

And Nablus, which Ma'an calls "Israeli-occupied", is in reality controlled by the Abbas/Fatah Palestinian Authority, having been "handed over to the Palestinian National Authority on December 12, 1995, as a result of the Oslo Accords Interim Agreement" [Wikipedia].

A poster on social media [Twitter] calls the "passer-by" Omar Awni Younes (the Younes clan are a large part of the Saniriya population) and quotes a post uploaded by him this morning: "this is a jihad, victory or martyrdom".