25-Jan-17: Vehicle ramming assault tonight on Jerusalem's northern edge (and the backstory)

A photo taken at the scene (credit: Elazar Yisraeli) [Image Source] 

A brief Times of Israel bulletin posted to its website a little after 7:00 pm (Israel time) this evening says:

The IDF is investigating reports of an alleged car-ramming attack in the central West Bank. According to initial reports, the incident occurred at a crossing near Ma’ale Michmash, north of Jerusalem. The driver of the vehicle is said to have been shot. No Israelis have been reported injured.

Over on the Rotter (Hebrew-language) forum, there are several user-contributed posts which indicate what happened. In our words:

• A pick-up truck with Palestinian Authority license plates drove into a bus stop located next to the gas station near the Israeli community of Maale Michmas (population: about 1,400) just before 7 this evening. 
• The community is part of the Mateh Binyamin region, located on Jerusalem's northern edge. 
• Eyewitness say the Arab driver tried to crush people standing at the bus stop, of which there appear to have been many. But his vehicle was effectively blocked by the presence of protective metal security posts embedded in concrete at the bus stop. 
• No Israelis were hurt, as far as we can tell. Gunfire ensued as armed passers-by sought to stop the attacker. 
• He was shot and according to unconfirmed reports is alive but injured.

(But note that what happened has a disturbing backstory which we added at the foot of this post.)

Rule of thumb: When Arab-on-Israeli
acts of terror are thwarted, they are almost invariably
labelled "alleged". But never in Arabic.

UPDATE 7:50 pm Wednesday January 25, 2017: Times of Israel says the attacker is dead and that he had more than a simple vehicle-borne assault on people's bodies on his mind:

The Israeli civilians who were standing at the bus stop were uninjured. According to the military, the driver swerved from his lane and crashed his truck into the metal bollards surrounding a bus stop near the Ma’ale Michmash settlement in the central West Bank. Israeli troops who were stationed nearby opened fire, killing the Palestinian man. When the soldiers checked the vehicle, they found that the driver had a knife in his hand, the army says. The identity of the Palestinian driver has yet to be revealed.

On the website of the Palestinian Arab news site Ma'an, the latest flash bulletin reads: "Palestinian killed near settlement after alleged vehicular attack". Evidently they mean tonight's thwarted murder-by-vehicle "alleged" assault.

Arab reports, quoting the Palestinian Authority health ministry identify the thwarted attacker as Hussein Salem Abu Ghosh, 24, from Qalandiya. One such report says

Hussein is the cousin of Hussein Mohammad Abu Ghosh, 17, who was killed a year ago on January 26, 2016, after he and Ibrahim Osama Allan, 23, stabbed a settler, identified as Shlomit Krigman, 24, who later died from her wounds at the Hadassah Israeli medical center, in Jerusalem. Another Israeli woman was seriously injured in the same incident... ["Israeli Army Kills A Young Palestinian Man Near Ramallah", IMEMC News, January 26, 2017]

We wrote about the tragic murder of Shlomit Krigman ["26-Jan-16: Two attackers stab women at neighborhood grocery store; instantly become figures of emulation"] a year ago. Seems the hideous process of Arab-on-Israeli terror-emulation has not yet completed running its course.

Why are we not surprised? (Answer: Because it's precisely what the ongoing daily incitement to fresh acts of terror, murder, violence and hatred on the part of the Palestinian Authority and the Abbas clique that rule it is calculated to achieve.)

01-May-16: What Yehudit knows

The scene of Thursday night's attack near Beit Horon [Image Source]

Far from the headlines and the public speech-making, the mind-numbing daily violence visited by the Palestinian Arabs on Israelis impacts a broad range of lives: the security personnel, the emergency first-responders, the people living in the communities targeted by the agents of jihad. And the families of everyone we just mentioned.

An email we received this morning from our friend Yehudit brings home some of the back-story - the aspects most people don't get to hear or know about even if they are otherwise well-informed on what the news-reporting industry reveals about daily events in our part of the world.

Yehudit, a veteran resident of one of the flourishing post-1967 communities around Jerusalem's northern edge, as well as being a mother and wife and home-maker, volunteers as an emergency medic. She and her fellow medics are called out at all hours to meet the urgent needs of unforeseen events, and especially in these difficult times of injuries arising from Arab-on-Israeli terror attacks.

Here's what she wrote to us this morning:

This past Thursday night after nightfall, the evening of the seventh day of Passover, we found ourselves called away from the festive meal for yet another security/medical emergency. This time, the location was one where, at least six times before, a terror attack had been launched. This time, B"H, our brave defenders were unharmed. One of the terrorists was shot when she came at them with two really large knives and a syringe with the goal of carrying out a murder. 

Sadly, another attack in which the assailant is a "she". Actually, two of them.

Our team provided the monstrous young female terrorist with emergency medical treatment and she was rushed to hospital. The second terrorist, also a female, was placed under arrest and removed from the scene to be interrogated. Seeing these two girls and realizing what brought them there, what plans they had, what their motivations might have been, is something I can never ever get used to. It's striking to me how we are all - the soldiers on security duty along with their officers and the members of the emergency team - only too well acquainted with the emergency routines. Sometimes, we look one another in the eye for a brief moment even as we are busy with giving the best possible medical care, often life-saving treatment, to someone who is getting that treatment only because he or she wanted to murder one of us. Or more than one. Words don't do justice to the difficulty of that reality. That look in the eye, it's like saying to one another "Can you believe we're here, doing this, now?"

We asked Yehudit how old the two Thursday night would-be murderers were.

Of course I know their ages. 15 and 16, I believe. It's unreal. And don't forget this is happening again and again at a location on one of the busiest highways connecting the capital with Tel Aviv, right next to the busy city of Modi'in and a spot which sees thousands of motorists pass by every day. 

We looked for news coverage of the Thursday night attack. We could find only this:

Israeli authorities arrested on Thursday two Palestinians who tried to stab IDF soldiers in Samaria, the army said, adding that one of them was shot and wounded. The suspects carrying knives approached Israeli soldiers at a checkpoint near Ramallah, in an apparent bid to attack them. The soldiers opened fire in self defense and one of the Palestinians was wounded, an army spokeswoman added... [Israel National News, April 30, 2016]

And this

The incident took place on Thursday evening at the Bell checkpoint, near the community of Beit Horon, in the Mateh Binyamin Regional Council, when the two Palestinian women, armed with knives, arrived at the checkpoint. The two asked the soldiers for water and then tried to stab those seeking to help them. The soldiers, who were unharmed, opened fire, wounding one of the terrorists. The other terrorist fled and was found moments later, hiding in nearby bushes. The injured terrorist was treated on site and then taken to Shaare Zedek Medical Center in Jerusalem. According to the military, one of the women was also found to be carrying a syringe full of liquid whose nature has yet to be determined, as well as a suicide note. [Israel Hayom, May 1, 2016]

Yehudit's account throws light on one small, barely-reported aspect of life in the shadow of a neighbour gripped by a death cult; a neighbour who daily fills the heads of his people's children (though never his own children) with thoughts of the glories of killing and being killed in the name of a centuries-old hatred, all the while brazenly pretending this is some version of "resistance" to something termed "occupation". Pretending to the civilized outside world, of course, but not to their own society.

More sickening still is the way this Palestinian Arab worship at the altar of jihad and "blood purity" has entranced Western onlookers living safely remote from the violence and from the challenges of living side-by-side with blood-lusting neighbours. We doubt their delicate, human-rights-obsessed minds can quite grasp what it must mean to not only share trains, roads, hospital wards with people for whom institutionalized government-promoted martyrdom is a life-defining reality but also to choose to leave your family in the middle of the night and go out to tend to the wounds of the Palestinian Arab children who are the principal (but not only) victims of that death-cult worship.

In her gentle, wise and humane way, Yehudit can probably explain it to them.

13-Mar-16: Friday night rockets and a drive-by shooting

Friday night on Route 443 after a shooting attack [Image Source]

The respite which the Sabbath provides from the rush of news is behind us. While we were engaged in very pleasant family-focused matters, the Arab-on-Israeli violence continued apace.

On Friday night, two attacks occurred at about 10:30 pm, though no one seems to be connecting them. One was directed at the IDF, the other at anyone or anything they could hit. In the jihadist strategy, the two amount to the same thing.

In the Negev region of southern Israel, Tzeva Adom (Color Red) sirens pierced the air in and around Sha’ar Hanegev (population: about 6,000) and Sderot (population: 24,000) warning residents to take immediate cover. Several rockets crashed into open fields a few moments later. It's now known (says Ynet) that the IDF detected four in-bound rockets. There are no reports of injuries or damage, but it's self-evident that, for those doing the firing in the Gaza Strip, this was not the intended outcome.

A little earlier on Friday evening, according to Times of Israel, Hamas hacked into the private satellite feed of Israel’s Channel 2 television channel, interrupting broadcasts with a video promising its “terror will never end.” (According to Israel National News, this is the second time in recent years that Hamas has broken in to Channel Two broadcasts by broadcasting a very strong signal over the same frequency.) The rockets were fired soon after.

Israeli forces shot back at four Hamas targets in northern Gaza. This, according to "senior official Ismael Radwan" of Hamas, which rules the Gaza Strip with an iron fist, amounted to “an escalation”. Quoted by Times of Israel, the Hamas man placed “full responsibility” on Israel.

The EU-funded Ma'an News Agency, reporting Israel's response in the Arabic version of its news report (but not in its English edition) terms this "Israeli aggression". The terrorists of Hamas - in every language - warned the following day, also according to Times of Israel, that their patience is "wearing thin".

No other Gaza Strip organization - home to numerous terror-focused factions and splinter groups - has claimed to be behind Friday night's rockets.

At about the same time as the Friday night, rockets, IDF soldiers manning a security checkpoint on busy Route 443, Jerusalem's major northern intercity artery, near Beit Horon came under drive-by gunfire attack . Two soldiers are injured. Both were taken to Shaarei Zedek Medical Center in Jerusalem for hospital care. One has a bullet wound to the leg, the other has bruising injuries. Both are reported to be in satisfactory condition. Jerusalem Post says: "The gunman escaped back into Palestinian Authority territory, security forces said, and IDF units launched a search for him."

26-Jan-16: Two attackers stab women at neighborhood grocery store; instantly become figures of emulation

Beit Horon [Image Source]

If you drive from Jerusalem towards Ben Gurion airport and the coast, you generally choose one of two alternative routes. One is Route 1, the main highway now under massive reconstruction of the first ten kilometers that wend their way up and down the hills around the capital. The other is Route 443 that passes Givat Ze'ev and then Beit Horon.

Yesterday, in the small Beit Horon community (population: about 1,300, and a long Jewish history) that abuts the busy commuter route, a pair of Palestinian Arab men with terror on their minds made their way unhindered into the heart of the neighborhood - evidently via a breach in its periphery fence or by climbing over - towards the makolet, the local grocery store. This is the fourth attack in a week in which Arabs have brought their terror right inside Israeli communities; the others were in Tekoa, Otniel and Anatot/Almon.

They stopped briefly to place several home-made explosive devices just outside the shop. Just before or after that, they evidently spotted two women, one walking along the sidewalk, a second one in the nearby car park, and stabbed them both brutally. Security camera footage [here] shows them then being stopped at the entrance to the makolet by its proprietor aided by what he had at hand - a shopping cart. This worked. Sometime very soon after that, a security guard shot them both. They are now dead.

Members of the Israel Police bomb squad, called to the scene, neutralized the bombs, three of them. The stabbing victims were given emergency treatment and then rushed to hospital in Jerusalem. One is 23 years old, and was taken by ambulance to the Hadassah Medical Center hospital on Jerusalem's Mount Scopus in critical condition. The other, a woman said to be in her late fifties, has moderate injuries and is now at the capital's Shaarei Zedek Medical Center.

This morning, Tuesday, news reports say the younger of the two victims died of her injuries during the night. We still have no knowledge of who they are. That will surely come later today.

We know the attackers' names. Arabic-language news sources [here, for instance] say they are Osama Ibrahim Yousef Allan, 23, from nearby Beit Ur al-Tahta [بيت عور التحتى] and Hussein Mohamed Abu Ghosh, 17, from Qalandiya, an Arab neighbourhood from which a stream of killers, stabbers and would-be jihadists have emerged in recent months (most recently mentioned in our blog here, here and here.)

It's reported that they posted on Facebook in the hours before the murderous attack that they were "going to hunt porcupines". One of the thugs was immediately claimed [see poster] as "son, martyr, hero" by Fatah, the terrorist band headed by PA president Mahmoud Abbas. Their photos, part of the process of elevating armed thuggery to something higher and worthy of emulation, already began popping up across the Arabic media [here, for instance] in the hours after the terrorism.

Knowing how these matters work, there is no room for doubt that their stabbing of two unarmed women makes them heroes in the perverted society from which they emerged, starting at its highest levels. Their deaths at the hands of a security guard turns them in martyrs with custom posters for family and friends to admire.

Shlomit Kriegman Z"L

The IDF, immediately after the attack, set up roadblocks in the area and cordoned off nearby Beit Ur al-Tahta "with only those requiring medical attention permitted to enter or leave", in the words of a Haaretz report.

UPDATE Tuesday January 26, 2016 at 8:00 am: Israel National News says the woman murdered in Beit Horon yesterday is Shlomit Kriegman, 24, who "did her National Service with Bnei Akiva in Beit Horon. During the last year Shlomit lived with her grandfather and grandmother in the community." Her funeral will be at 1:00 pm today (Tuesday) at Jerusalem's Har Hamenuhot Cemetery. May her memory be a blessing.

12-Dec-12: Scenes from the front lines, courtesy of the Tayar Report

Palestinian Arab attackers, equipped with rocks and Molotov cocktails

The chronology below is a continuation of the reports we have published in recent months based on information received via the Tayar Security Report, with some editing and annotating by us. Yehudit Tayar produces her invaluable bulletins on the basis of first-responder, police and army reports.

Friday November 30, 2012

• Halhul Bypass Road adjacent to Highway 60: An Israeli vehicle is attacked by rock-throwing Arabs at the exact spot where Asher Palmer and his infant son Yonatan HY"D were murdered in September 2011 ["25-Sep-11: "Only" rock throwers - but now a father and his infant son are dead"] This time, one person is lightly injured and given medical care at the scene.

Sunday December 2, 2012

• Near Anbata, east of Tul Karem: Several Israeli vehicles come under rock attack by Arabs; damage is limited this time to property loss.
• The Benjamin region close to Hizma: Several Israeli vehicles come under rock attack by Arabs.
• Between Hawara Checkpoint and Tapuah Junction: Several Israeli vehicles come under rock and Molotov cocktail attack by Arabs. There is resultant property damage.
• Between the community of Adam and the Hizma Crossing in the Benjamin region near the northern entrance to Jerusalem: Ongoing heavy rock attacks on Israeli vehicles result in a traffic accident
• South of Nablus/Shechem near Hawara: Several Israeli vehicles come under rock attack by Arabs.
• Route 443 in the Benjamin region, a major intercity highway running between the coastal plane and Jerusalem: In the vicinity of Bet Horon and the village of A-Tira: Several Israeli vehicles come under rock attack by Arabs.
• Between the Arab village of Azun and the Israeli community of Ma'aleh Shomron: Several Israeli vehicles come under rock attack by Arabs.

Monday December 3, 2012

• Between Shavei Shomron and Einav in the Shomron region: An Arab driver deliberately crashes his vehicle into an IDF military jeep, causing the jeep to crash and overturn. Four security personnel re injured.  The Arab driver, armed with an ax, approaches the Israelis and is shot and killed. [See also our post: "3-Dec-12 [UPDATED]: Ax-wielding Palestinian Arab is stopped by Israeli soldiers this morning"]

Tuesday December 4, 2012

• Near El Arub on the Gush Etzion-Hevron highway: Two Molotov cocktails are hurled at Israeli vehicles. No serious injuries or damage.

Wednesday December 5, 2012

• Near Beit El in the Benjamin region: Two Molotov cocktails are burled at an Israeli passenger bus. No serious injuries or damage.
• Massive rock attacks occur near Ma'aleh Shomron, and in the vicinity of Ariel.

Thursday December 6, 2012

• At Shavei Shomron Junction: An IDF jeep comes under attack by Arabs armed with Molotov cocktails.
• Near Hawara, an Israel bus carrying school students comes under rock attack by Arabs, causing property damage.
• At the Hizma Crossing in the Benjamin region: the driver of an Israeli bus reports his vehicle came under rock attack the communities of Rachelim and Eli.
• On the Gush Etzion-Hevron highway near Beit Ummar: Arabs subject Israeli vehicles, including buses, to sustained rock and boulder attacks. Though there are no injuries,there is significant property damage, including damage to vehicles.
• Hevron: In Kikar Hashoter ("Policeman's Square") IDF soldiers come under attack by a mob of some 150 Arabs armed with rocks and Molotov cocktails. The soldiers disperse the attackers.
• Hevron: An IDF patrol is attacked by police officers of the Palestinian Authority using their fists, while non-uniformed Arabs throw rocks. The IDF force retreats under a hail of rocks.

Friday December 7, 2012

• West of Nablus/Shechem: Violence directed at Israelis by Arabs. Two IDF soldiers are injured by rocks hurled at them; one suffers a suspected fracture of the arm. Another suffers facial injuries and lacerations. A third soldier suffers burn injuries from an exploding grenade thrown at him. IDF soldiers from the 76 Brigade of the Engineering Corps are evacuated to Beilinson Hospital in Petach Tikvah for treatment.
• On the Gush Etzion-Hevron highway at Beit Ummar: Ongoing violent attacks by Arabs directed against Israeli vehicles result in one driver suffering head injury from rocks hurled at her vehicle; she manages to continue driving until she reaches Karmei Zur where she is treated by an IDF ambulance crew and taken to hospital by Magen David Adom. Damage is caused to Israeli vehicles including buses. IDF forces disperse the agitators into the village.

Saturday December 8, 2012

• North-west of Ramallah near El Moiyer: Explosive devices are found on the road and inside a pipe on the road. IDF bomb squad sappers are called in and they safely dispose of the threats. 
• On the Gush Etzion-Hevron highway at Beit Ummar: Several Israeli vehicles come under rock attack by Arabs.

Sunday December 9, 2012

• Azun Junction: A Molotov cocktail is thrown by Arabs. No injuries or damage.
• The road running between Har Homa and Tekoa in Jerusalem's southern suburbs: An Israeli bus comes under rock attack by Arabs near Herodian Square, causing damage but no injuries.
• Near Azun: Israeli vehicles and buses are attacked by Arabs armed with rocks and Molotov cocktails.
• Near Hawara: Molotov cocktails is hurled at an Israeli vehicle.
• The tunnel road running south from Jerusalem and under Bethlehem: Several Israeli vehicles come under rock attack by Arabs; no injuries but there is property damage.

Tuesday December 11, 2012

• Between Nili and Na'aleh in the Benjamin region: Molotov cocktail is hurled at an Israeli vehicle.

Wednesday December 12, 2012 (today)

• North of Ofra in the Mateh Binyamin region: Several Israeli vehicles come under rock attack by Arabs; no injuries but there is property damage.
• On the Gush Etzion-Hevron highway near Beit Ummar: Arabs subject an Israeli passenger bus to rock and boulder attack.

Postscript from Yehudit Tayar: "These reports are translated and publicized by Hatzalah Yehudah and Shomron with the clearance and confirmation of the IDF. Hatzalah Yehudah and Shomron is a voluntary emergency medical organization with over 500 volunteer doctors, paramedics, medics who are on call 24/7 and work along with the IDF, 669 IAF Airborn Rescue, the security officers and personal throughout Yesha and the Jordan Valley, and with MDA. We, the volunteers of Hatzalah Yehudah and Shomron go out to rescue anyone who needs our emergency medical assistance; including civilians, military and Arabs also those within the PA territories. (with IDF presence) To us a life is precious and we go out at risk leaving home and family or stopping on the road to rescue anyone in need."