29-Nov-15: A second Sunday morning stabbing in Jerusalem

Shamgar Street in Jerusalem's Romema quarter - the scene of this morning's
second Arab-on-Israeli stabbing [Image Source]

The knives - attached to the hands of malevolent Palestinian Arabs with murder on their minds - continue to be out and active here in Jerusalem.

A woman of about 30 was stabbed a little after 10 this morning in the second Arab-on-Israeli stabbing of the day. The report from the ambulance people says "When we arrived at the scene we saw a woman about 30 years of age with a stab wound to her upper body in the front seat of a bus." The bus was reported else as the number 418 line. Egged's website says this line originates in Beit Shemesh.

The assailant is being sought now via a manhunt in the buildings - and we assume the numerous construction sites - near and along the Shamgar Street in the Romema neighbourhood on the city's north side.

The victim was rushed to Shaarei Zedek Medical Center for emergency treatment.

UPDATE 12 noon Sunday November 29, 2015
Events have evolved. Here's a clarified version of what happened in the Shamgar/Romema neighbourhood a couple of hours ago, according to Times of Israel:

The attacker approached the woman from behind as she waited at a bus stop on Shamgar Street, stabbed her in her upper back and fled. The woman was taken onto bus number 418, which stood open at the stop, where medics treated her wound. Medics said she is fully conscious and stable.
The terrorist fled the scene, triggering a manhunt in nearby buildings and streets, according to police. Shortly after 11 a.m., police said they located the man, age 17 and half, hiding in a construction site nearby. He was identified as a Hebron resident, and police said he admitted he had carried out the attack. He also matched descriptions provided by eyewitnesses to the attack. The suspect was handed over to the special investigations unit of the Jerusalem Police for questioning. Two other suspected accomplices were also arrested by police nearby.

How old are the accomplices? We don't know yet.

The stabber, as with so many of these murder-minded young men and women, is not legally an adult. So let's chalk that up as yet another "victory" for the lethal education delivered by the PA and by UNRWA, the UN agency that's up to its eyeballs in the blood of Jewish victims and of Palestinian Arab wasted lives.

And let's never lose sight of where the money - without which that catastrophic grooming of haters, savages and killers could never happen - comes from.

UPDATE 9:00 pm Sunday November 29, 2015: The victim is Hisouri Tepalya, a Nepalese female national [Times of Israel], one of thousands engaging in caring for disabled and/or elderly Israelis. At least one of the PA's diplomatic missions in Europe thinks differently and, quoting the scurrilous WAFA news service which serves as the PA's authorized mouthpiece, calls her "an Israeli female settler [injured] in an alleged stabbing attack" [Website of the PA Mission to Denmark] because, well, everyone living in Israel is in their eyes a "settler" and just because there's a victim with serious knife wounds doesn't mean the Israelis ought to be believed.

23-Oct-15: Scenes from a stabbing/ramming/shooting war of terror

The "moderate" Abbas in front of poster
of his mentor, the arch-terrorist and Nobel Prize
laureate Yasser Arafat

A month ago, and several weeks before arranging for his wife's brother to be admitted to Israel's best private hospital as a VIP patient ["23-Oct-15: When the people inciting the knifings/rammings/shootings need really good doctors, where do they turn?"], the highly-immoderate "moderate" president of the Palestinian Authority, made some public statements that ignited a firestorm.

"Al-Aksa is ours and so is the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. They [the Jews] have no right to desecrate them with their filthy feet. We won’t allow them to do so and we will do whatever we can to defend Jerusalem... Each drop of blood that was spilled in Jerusalem is pure blood as long as it’s for the sake of Allah. Every shahid (martyr) will be in heaven and every wounded person will be rewarded, by Allah’s will." [Abbas quoted in Jerusalem Post, September 16, 2015]

Thoughts of pure blood, of filthy feet, of heaven and of being rewarded for the spilling of blood have propelled an onslaught of Palestinian Arab savagery against Israelis, overwhelmingly against non-uniformed Israelis and visitors, since Mahmoud Abbas uttered those words.

Some selected scenes from the past 36 hours of this savage war of terror directed at Israelis. (And to be clear - we don't claim to be reporting all the terror attacks; nowhere near it, in fact. There are too many of them in too many parts of our beautiful country, and it's simply depressing to list them in the numbers in which they are happening.)

Irish news report about the "alleged" Beit Shemesh attack on a
Jewish school bus on Thursday morning [Source]

• From this morning (Friday) here in Jerusalem, Times of Israel says police thwarted yet another terror attack directed (as usual) at civilians, this time in Jerusalem’s Nof Zion neighborhood in East Jerusalem. Local residents noticed a suspect surveying homes in the area and called for police help. A Border Police patrol unit soon arrived and stopped the suspect, asking him to show his hands. He he kept his right hand behind his back and refused to show it. When pressed, the report says, he kept it in a fist. An officer "subdued" him, and found a knife concealed in the suspect's sleeve. He turns out to be a 21-year-old male from Jabel Mukaber, a village inside the city limits of Jerusalem, and the source of a considerable flow of hatred-driven terrorism now and in the past. Past mentions in our blog include "16-Sep-15: Jerusalem Watch | Not-so-new New Year violence"; "19-Sep-15: Jerusalem Watch | Yet more rage"; "13-Oct-15: A bloody day and the malevolence behind it"; "17-Oct-15: Bloody Saturday". The vile killers of several rabbis in a synagogue in Jerusalem's Har Nof section came from Jabel Mukaber, and massacre of unarmed men at prayer caused an eruption of celebration there in its immediate aftermath ["26-Dec-14: The ongoing search for Arabic-language outrage at the men with the meat-cleavers and knives"].
• It's October, which is the time for the olive harvest season in our part of the world. The IDF, alert to the tensions that often erupt during the Palestinian Arab olive harvest, provides secure coverage for the picking in selected locations. Ynet says that early this morning (Friday), at one of those spots in the Gush Etzion area a few kilometers south of Jerusalem, a company of IDF soldiers arrived, "as they do every morning during this season, to open the separation barrier near the settlement of Geva'ot to let Palestinian olive farmers cross the barrier and work their olive groves located west of the fence.  After soldiers opened the gate, a Palestinian attacked one of them, a tracker from the Etzion Regional Brigade, and stabbed him in the upper body. His fellow soldiers immediately shot the terrorist in the foot and neutralized him. The terrorist is a 16-year-old from the village of Surif." The assailant who plunged a knife into the soldier's back was shot in the leg and lightly injured. He is now being fixed in Hadassah Ein Karem Medical Center, Jerusalem. His victim is in Jerusalem's Shaarei Zedek Medical Center.
• Thursday afternoon, a Palestinian Arab made an unsuccessful stabbing attack on an IDF soldier close to the Hassam Shoter checkpoint in Hevron's Tel Rumeida neighborhood. He fled and a search failed to find him. The site of the attack was mentioned in a post [here] a few days ago.
• In Beit Shemesh yesterday (Thursday) morning, a terror attack plot that could easily have cost a terribly high price ended up as something less painful, though certainly worrying and with victims. In the Haaretz account, officers at the Beit Shemesh police station received an early morning report that two terror suspects had tried to board a private school bus with young children on board and had been frightened away by the yelling of nearby civilians. Police were sent to the area (according to locals, only after an unreasonable delay) and spotted the suspects just as they launched a stabbing attack on a young man standing at a bus stop on Yehezkel Hanavi Street. The police promptly opened fire in accordance with the new shoot-to-kill rules of engagement when confronting terrorists in the act.  Palestinian Arab sources now say the attackers were Mahmoud Ghanimat and Makdad Heeh, both about 20, both from the village of Tzurif, near Hebron, and both construction workers engaged at a construction site in the rapidly-developing Ramat Beit Shemesh Gimel section of town. Haaretz says: "Under their t-shirts, police found they were wearing a second t-shirt with the emblems of the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades, the military wing of Hamas. The Shin Bet security service said one was a Hamas activist and the other had been imprisoned from 2012 to 2014 after being apprehended with a knife in the area of the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron." One of the attackers died of his wounds; the other is injured and in a bad way. Their victim is described as "a young Haredi man, aged about 18". The police and the municipal authorities are now saying they will increase enforcement of the law regarding the presence of Palestinian Arab workers in the city: "The investigation into the attack will include determining how the two reached Beit Shemesh from the area of the southern Hebron hills, which is considered a prime place where Palestinians illegally enter Israel.  Because of various breaks in the fence in the area, many Palestinians enter Israel there daily.  The regional council has complained about this for a long time, and the daily transit of Palestinians into Israel there is well-known to the security forces, but nothing has been done.  Defense sources estimate that about 34,000 Palestinians illegally enter Israel every day through the various breaks in the fence, not only in the Hebron area."
  Notice the screen shot we posted above, taken from the website of the Irish Independent news site. We think the Palestinian Arabs must occasionally ask themselves what they did right to be on the receiving end of so much undeserved journalistic benevolence by Irish reporters, editors and analysts. It's an ongoing scandalous disgrace.
• In the very early hours of Thursday morning, just after midnight and a block away from Jerusalem's Central Bus Station on Yirmiyahu Street, a Jewish man was shot to death (Haaretz says) after he was suspected of being a terrorist and, according to testimony, tried to snatch a weapon from an Israel Defense Forces soldier. The IDF Spokesman's Unit said it was a soldier that fired at the man, and that "the security services are investigating details of the incident."
• On Wednesday, a young female soldier serving in the Home Front Command's Kedem battalion was severely wounded in a stabbing attack at Adam Junction, on Jerusalem's northern edge. Jerusalem Post says a second female soldier shot and killed the knife attacker. He is identified as Ibrahim Mu'taz Zawiya, 21, from Azarya, near Ma'ale Adumim. An additional suspect was apprehended near the scene. The injured young woman is being treated at Hadassah Ein Karem hospital, and though her injuries were critical at first, she is said to be doing better.

It's an intense and difficult time, with considerable fear in the air, as well as anger and deep resentment at the overt nature of the incitement emanating from the political leadership of the Palestinian Arabs. It's hard for ordinary Israelis to comprehend how the people on the other side - chief among them Mahmoud Abbas, the mis-named "moderate" - show such willingness to weaponize their own children and place them in the front lines of the attacks on mainly-civilian Israeli targets.

7-Jul-14: And now a night in the life...

We will be updating this post as Monday evening wears on.

• Around 8:30 pm, Tzeva Adom siren warnings are heard in a huge swathe of the country including (in no particular order) Ashdod, Nes Ziona, Rehovot, Kiryat Malachi, Beer Tuvia, Kibbutz Brenner, Gederot, Beit Shemesh, Kibbutz Gezer, Gan Raveh, the Yavneh region, Har Hevron area, Hof Ashkelon, Lachish, Nahal Sorek and Emek Hefer. That list includes places that can legitimately be thought of as the Tel Aviv metropolitan area.
• In the Ashdod attacks, we know of one person lightly injured by shrapnel. 
• Haaretz's rocket/mortar count for the day has reached 70. Not much expectation that it is going to taper off without something decisive from the Israeli side.
• A Haaretz report around 9:00 pm makes the astounding statement that the Iron Dome system has just made seven mid-flight rocket intercepts over Ashdod and five over Netivot. This is serious fire. 
• 9:00 pm: An estimated 60 rockets were fired into Israel during the past hour alone. Hamas takes credit (source: Times of Israel). 
• Seven people are treated for shock in the wake of this latest rocket barrage, according to Israel's Channel 2 TV news which also reports Israeli air activity in southern Israel's skies.
• The US State Department says "the US condemns rocket fire from Gaza and supports Israel's right to defend itself". Astonishingly, this does not slow down the incoming rockets.
• 9:20 pm: Incoming-rocket warnings again, this time Hof Ashkelon and Eshkol regions.
• From the BBC, background on Israel's version of what ended the careers of several Hamas terrorists today: "Israeli military spokesman Lt Col Peter Lerner said the tunnel where the men died had been bombarded on Thursday. He said the militants were killed as they went into the tunnel on Sunday to assess the damage and meddled with some explosives, which were apparently detonated accidentally. The Israeli military believes the militants planned to use the tunnels to infiltrate Israel, kill or abduct residents of nearby communities and troops."
• A Tweet just now from NGO Monitor's Prof. Gerald Steinberg (@GeraldNGOM) reminds @HRW @amnesty @btselem @EUinIsrael @kenroth that 65 rockets from Gaza, directed at Israeli civilians, amount to 65 war crimes. The silence from the highly-politicized, self-appointed guardians of human rights is considerably more eloquent than their carefully framed occasional crocodile-tear expressions of regret and sympathy when Israeli victims unavoidably need to be addressed. And in case they want to hide behind professed doubt as to who is doing the rocket firings, Haaretz's Jack Khoury reports that Hamas is proud to take full credit tonight.

• And newsagency reports say the same.
• Train travel throughout Israel's south is severely impacted by today's fighting. Many train services are cancelled (Ynet).
• A guest at an outdoor wedding in Netivot tonight (outdoor weddings suit our climate well) captured a video clip of a Hamas rocket being destroyed in mid-flight. Check it out even if Hebrew's not your first language.
• 9:45 pm Another incoming rocket report from Sderot and Sha'ar Hanegev regions, followed a few minutes later by reports from the same two places plus Hof Ashkelon. No reports yet of results on the ground.
• 10:00 pm: In Ashdod, all school classes for tomorrow are canceled. And at Be'er Sheva's Ben Gurion University of the Negev, they have just announced that exams set for tomorrow are postponed until further notice. Same goes for Sapir Academic College in Sderot.
• 10:20 pm Physical damage in the wake of an incoming Gazan rocket that crashed into the Yoav region.
• Around 10:30 pm, says Times of Israel, the Iron Dome system brings down another in-flight Gazan rocket. This one was pointed at Sderot. Three others land crashed and exploded in open areas in Sha'ar HaNegev region and near Sderot.
• A Grad rocket crashed and exploded somewhere close to Kiryat Malachi. There's damage.
• The national ambulance service, Magen David Adom, is now officially on high alert in central and southern Israel. Further Gazan attacks are expected overnight and they need to be ready.
• At Soroka Medical Center, the Be'er Sheva hospital that serves a huge area in Israel's south including (naturally) a very high percentage of Arabs, and is reputed to have more births each year than any other Israeli hospital, they announced in the last hour [Hebrew report] that all preemie babies and newborns have been moved urgently to rocket-protected parts of the hospital buildings. There's no statistical breakdown of the respective number of Moslem, Christian and Jewish mothers/babies because, being Israel, that has no relevance to anything worth talking about.
• Rock-throwing Arabs from Beit Safafa, a generally quiet West Jerusalem neighbourhood, have been causing serious problems ronight for drivers and for the police [Hebrew report]. 
• Acknowledging the way the social media and the Internet can mould people's perceptions, and sometimes manipulate them, a BBC article tonight points out that many of the most-widely circulating images purporting to show Gaza in flames are fakes. "A #BBCtrending investigation has found that many of these images are not from the latest conflict and not even from Gaza. Some date as far back as 2009 and others are from conflicts in Syria and Iraq."
• 11:00 pm Another round of incoming-missile siren warnings from the IDF's Tzeva Adom system. Awaiting details from the areas impacted, principally Sderot and Sha'ar Hanegev. 
• 11:25 pm Yet another rocket attack on Sderot (perhaps on other places too). This one must have been on-course to do real harm because the Iron Dome system was deployed again, and intercepted one of those rockets in mid-flight. The bad news is that the thugs with the rockets have far, far more rockets than Israel has anti-rockets. At Times of Israel they quote Yaakov Amidror, former national security adviser: Hamas has “about 10,000 rockets” in its arsenal (he tells Channel 2) and “we may be in for many more nights” of rocket attacks. And the "good" news? Hamas “does not have any kind of game-changing Doomsday weapon” so we can breathe... easier?
• 11:50 pm Tzeva Adom sirens sounding in Hof Ashkelon region.
• 12:30 am More Jerusalem area clashes tonight involving Arab neighbourhoods - this time Beit Hanina on Jerusalem's north side where some of the locals are hurling firebombs at police.
• 12:30 am Tzeva Adom siren warnings again, and they're unlikely to be the last of the night, being heard now in Hof Ashkelon region again.
• 12:35 am Initial and unconfirmed report [Hebrew] of a shooting attack in a Jewish neighbourhood of East Jerusalem.