14-Jul-17: In the Jerusalem Old City shadow of one of their more sacred sites, an Arab-on-Israeli shooting attack

Image Source: Al Jazeera

There has been an Arab-on-Israeli shooting attack this morning - the Moslem Sabbath - at a location adjacent to the sacred Temple Mount (in Hebrew: Har Habayit) plaza in Jerusalem’s Old City.

Two Israeli victims are reported to be seriously injured with gunshot wounds and were rushed to Hadassah Medical Center's Mount Scopus hospital for emergency treatment.

A third is injured more lightly as a result of being hit by shrapnel and sustaining wounds to the neck, arms and hands. He is being treated at Jerusalem's Shaarei Zedek Medical Center.

The three are described in a Times of Israel report as men in their 30s. (Past experience says the initial guesses are often wrong.)

Police opened fire on the Arab attackers and they are all now dead.

Police believe the armed gang approached the Temple Mount plaza shortly after 7:00 am today when the Temple Mount area is generally starting to be thronged by participants in the Friday prayers. They ran [as this graphic brief video shows] toward Lions' Gate - Sha'ar Ha'arayot in Hebrew - where they opened fire on the Israelis.

They then fled towards the Temple Mount complex with Israeli police in pursuit.

Video posted in the past hour shows one of the shooters lying on the ground with Israeli police, guns drawn and surrounding him. He suddenly jumps up, takes a flying leap with a knife drawn clearly trying to wound one of the police officers. He is shot before he can complete the stabbing.

The shooters were armed with two Carlo-style (from Carl Gustav) sub-machine guns and a pistol. A knife was also found at the scene. Photos are circulating on the Hebrew-language social media [link] this morning showing three Israeli photo-identification cards, said to prove that the Arab shooters were all the holders of Israeli citizenship or Israeli residential status.

As scenes of attempted carnage go, the Temple Mount is an especially historical and sacred one. (being frank about this, it's hard to ignore how often murderous attacks of a certain kind happen in synagogues, churches, mosques, sacred places and sacred times. Is there a pattern here?)

Lion's Gate is thought to have that name according to one theory because of the image of leopards - mistaken for lions - two on the left and two on the right - embedded in the wall beside the gate itself. (Another version says they are indeed lions.) It marks the start of the 600 meter long Via Dolorosa along which Jesus walked, according to tradition, on the way to his crucifixion. Fifty years ago, it was the entry point through which Israeli paratroops passed during the 1967 Six-Day War and famously unfurled an Israeli flag above the Temple Mount.

Despite its holy and historical nature, Arab-on-Israeli terror attacks do happen in the vicinity and with growing regularity. We have posted on attacks at or very close to Lions' Gate several times in the past 15 months:

• 03-May-16: On a quiet lane in Jerusalem's Old City, a Monday night terror-by-knifing attack
• 14-Dec-16: In Jerusalem's Old City this afternoon, an Arab-on-Israeli stabbing
• 13-Mar-17: Jerusalem and the (alleged) knife-men
• 13-May-17: In Jerusalem's Old City, a Jordanian stabs an Israeli and the Jordanians are outraged (so are we, for different reasons)

Times of Israel says that in the wake of this morning's terrorist attack, Jerusalem Police chief Yoram Halevi canceled prayers for the day on the Temple Mount for the first time in decades, ordering the complex cleared and the entrances to the holy site closed. Police have also placed security checkpoints at the entrances to the Old City.

Aftermath on the Temple Mount this morning [Image Source]

How did the terrorists manage to bring weapons into the holy site? Normal procedure - perhaps to the surprise of people less familiar with how real life is lived here - is that Muslim visitors to the Temple Mount are subjected to less rigorous security checking than non-Muslim visitors, all of whom are obliged by the Israeli authorities to enter via the Mughrabi foot-bridge.

There's bound to be a high-level investigation since the implications of what happened there today are serious and broad.

Don't expect the Palestinian Arab media to be asking the serious questions. They're still totally stuck in their victim-centric reporting-narrative style - the sort of reporting (referring to the Fatah-controlled and scandalous Ma'an News Agency) that produces this opening line today:

Three Palestinians and two Israeli police officers were killed during an armed confrontation in the Old City of occupied East Jerusalem early on Friday morning... ["3 Palestinian citizens of Israel, 2 police officers killed in Jerusalem shooting", Ma'an, today]

Armed confrontation?!

Al Jazeerah's man on the spot offers this insightful gem:

"It is reportedly the first time in years that the compound would be closed for prayers on Friday. Of course this has the potential to increase tensions among the about 10,000 Palestinians who normally pray here on Fridays," Fawcett said. ["Jerusalem: Palestinians killed after 'shooting attack'",  Al Jazeera, today]

Tensions?! The sub-machine guns and the knife don't raise the tensions. The critically injured Israelis don't raise the tensions. The cynical abuse of a site they declare to be holy doesn't raise the tensions. The utter silence of the Muslim religious leadership and their systematic, ongoing failure to condemn Arab-on-Israeli terrorist attacks don't raise the tensions.

But decisions by responsible law-and-order authorities, conditioned by long experience to know the nature of the Palestinian Arab mobs and the harm that generally follows (mainly in their own settlements and to their own children) their irresponsible violence - they raise the tensions.

Lethal journalism is what it's called.

UPDATE 12:30 pm Friday July 14, 2017:
Tragically, the two seriously injured Israelis shot by a gang of armed Arab attackers this morning have died of their wounds [Israel National News]. Times of Israel identifies them as two police officers, both from Israel's Druze community: Haiel Sitawe, 30, from Maghar, a mostly Druze and Arab city in northern Israel, who signed up with the Border Guard as part of his mandatory national service in 2012 and served in the unit responsible for securing the Temple Mount ever since; and Kamil Shnaan, 22, from Hurfeish, an almost entirely-Druze village also in Israel's north. Sitawe is survived by a wife, Irin, and a three-week-old son, as well as parents and three brothers. Shnaan was to celebrate his engagement party to his girlfriend in a week. He leaves behind parents, a brother and three sisters. His father, Shachiv Shnaan, served for a time as Knesset member representing, first the Labor party, and later Ehud Barak's short-lived Independence party.

The three dead attackers are all from the Israeli Arab town of Umm al-Fahm, with a population of more than 50,000 Israel's third-largest Arab community and a center of power for Israel's Islamic Movement whose notorious so-called Northern Branch headed by Raed Sallah was outlawed by Israel in 2016 because of its ties to Hamas and the Moslem Brotherhood. The dead gunman are all called Muhammad Jabarin and all are plainly from the same clan: Muhammad Ahmed Muhammad Jabarin, 29; Muhammad Hamad Abdel Latif Jabarin, 19; and Muhammad Ahmed Mafdal Jabarin, 19. The Jabarin clan's home base is Musherifa, a village in the vicinity of Um-al-Fahm.

UPDATE 3:00 pm Friday July 14, 2017
An updated version of the Ma'an news report on the terror attack calls the two proudly-patriotic Israeli Druze police officers who were the victims of the shooting attack this morning "Palestinian citizens of Israel" whose lives ended "during an armed confrontation":

Source

We fear the intention of the Ma'an editorial spinmeisters was not to bring comfort to the families of the fallen Druze police men.

In similar black-is-white fashion, the savages of Hamas and Islamic Jihad have fulsomely praised today's shooting attack with their own public statements. Hamas called the brazen bloodshed at a sacred site "heroic" and a ''natural consequence of a series of crimes''. Not to be outdone in the chase for outlandish similes, Islamic Jihad said the shootings were ''demonstrations of courage by our people against occupying forces that must now beware to cross a red line''.

Whether or not the Israeli side is going to be more cautious about crossing an imaginary Islamist line in the coming days, what's sadly clear (again) is that on a day in which five lives, all of them Arab, were lost in pointless Jerusalem violence, the fat-cats in Gaza are congratulating themselves as they pump the heads of their society's children with self-destructive notions of honor, courage and dying while killing the "occupiers" in the occupiers's own capital city.

26-Jan-17: A Wednesday night Arab-on-Israeli shooting attack

The caption from this March 9, 2016 news photo
says these are "Guns used by two
Palestinians who carried out a shooting attack...
(Israel Police)"

Shortly after Wednesday night's vehicle-borne assault on Israelis standing at a bus-stop just outside northern Jerusalem [our post], a second murderous attack occurred in the same general area. Fortunately the outcome involved no serious injuries to those who were attacked.

From the Times of Israel report:

A Palestinian man opened fire at Israeli troops from a moving car in the central West Bank on Wednesday night, the army said. The soldiers fired back, and injured him. No soldiers were injured in the attack, which took place outside the village of Aboud, northwest of Ramallah. The Palestinian gunman received medical treatment on the scene, the army said. Inside the vehicle, the soldiers found a Carlo-style submachine gun, a makeshift weapon that is prevalent in the West Bank and in the Israeli underworld.

Here's some background about that submachine gun:

...One of the most notable symbols to emerge from six months of Palestinian attacks in Israel and the West Bank has been the “Carlo,” otherwise known as the Carl Gustav submachine gun. The homemade or craft-produced rudimentary automatic weapon has been used in the majority of shooting attacks on Israeli civilians and security personnel. It’s not accurate and it has a limited range, but it’s cheap and more than powerful enough to cause mayhem and death — and it’s nearly impossible to prevent its production... “There has been an expanded effort to seize illegal weapons that pose a concrete and lethal threat to Israeli civilians and security forces,” an army spokesperson said. But nothing has been done so far to seriously curb the creation and proliferation of these homemade guns. While some more advanced rifles and firearms require specialized tools, the Carlo has remained so popular because of how little machinery and technical know-how is required to produce it, according to N.R. Jenzen-Jones, director of Armament Research Services (ARES), a specialized technical intelligence consultancy. A drill press, some welding equipment and blueprints from the internet are all that’s needed to create one of these potentially devastating weapons, a fact that presents a real challenge for Israel and countries around the world that are trying to prevent such guns from winding up in the hands of terrorists and criminals...  The Carlo, as it is known, derives its name from the Carl Gustav m/45 submachine gun, a design that was adopted by the Swedish army in 1945 and later licensed to Egypt, where units were sold under the names Port Said and Akaba, according to a forthcoming report... ["Say hello to ‘Carlo,’ the cheap, lethal go-to gun for terrorists", Times of Israel, March 16, 2016]

For a change, the Ma'an News Agency report eschews the use of "alleged" in its report of last night's terrorist attack, but calls what happened "an exchange of fire" between "Israeli forces" and a "Palestinian".

There's also a timely reminder of the ongoing nature of attacks like last night's in this brief report from Israel National News:

The Israel Defense Forces, Shabak Israel Security Agency and police carried out a widespread operation, Wednesday evening in Hevron, to seize a weapons factory in Hevron. The factory contained eight lathes for making weapons, which were dismantled. The operation was part of an ongoing campaign of nightly operations against weapons factories in Judea.

No one's suggesting this is the last or only Palestinian Arab gun-making workshop. More power to the IDF, the Shin Bet and the men and women of the Israel Police in their ever-vigilant efforts.

14-Mar-16: Back-to-back vehicle-ramming attacks in Kiryat Arba this morning

Scene of one of this morning's attacks

A windy, chilly, stormy morning and there have been two vehicle-ramming attacks against Israelis in Kiryat Arba, an Israeli community with a population of about 8,000 on the edge of Hebron.

Today's terror assaults, though unlikely to have much impact in the West, encompass three of the four major weapon groups that have featured in the raging Palestinian Arab violence of the past half year: rammings, knifings and shootings.

Times of Israel says one person was injured in the first when the driver, a Palestinian Arab, "apparently attempted to run over a hitchhiker" shortly before 7:00 am at a hitchhiking post at the Elias Junction outside Kiryat Arba. Soldiers at the scene opened fire on the attackers and hit them. One soldier was lightly hurt by shrapnel.

Weapons were found in the car. According to Jerusalem Post, there were two "would-be assailants" in the vehicle, each equipped with Carl Gustav rifles. That's a name given locally to locally-produced, relatively cheap, widely-available automatic weapons modeled on a standard 9mm submachine gun used by Sweden's military in the twenty years after the end of World War II.

An Israel National News report - and a report on the Rotter social media site - says two Israelis were then injured in a second vehicle-ramming attack very close to the first and very shortly after it. The attacker there is said to have been "neutralized".

The theologically-inspired martyr count, so beloved of the many parties doing the inciting to murder within Palestinian Arab society, will have grown by several more "heroes" this morning. Each such canonization - via the Arabic media (check out the ever-reliable, martyrdom-promoting Ma'an News Agency report that's already leading their news today), via the work of village and mosque preachers and via the disgraceful abuse of political leadership on constant view in Mahmoud Abbas' office - ensures more dead and more suffering on both sides.

It's been barely two hours, and Ma'an's Arabic-language report already identifies today's thwarted terrorists this way:

The martyrs are: Kasim Farid Abu Odeh Jaber from Hebron, Amir Fouad Junaidi of Hebron, Mustafa Yusuf Taraarh 18 years of the town of Bani Naim.

For self-evident reasons, Ma'an's English-language report can be expected to demurely skip the "martyr" labeling when it eventually appears. But they will surely more than make up for that by the obsessive use of "alleged" in describing what their deceased "heroes" were doing just prior to the explosive violence that abbreviated their lives.

UPDATE: Here's what Reuters is reporting now [9:00 am Monday]:

Three Palestinians attack Israeli troops in West Bank, shot dead: army
Kiryat Arba, West Bank: Three Palestinians carried out back-to-back gun and car-ramming attacks on Israelis near a Jewish settlement in the occupied West Bank on Monday and were shot dead by the army, it said. Two of the Palestinians, armed with a handgun and an improvised machine-pistol, were killed after opening fire on a bus stop at the entrance to Kiryat Arba, the army said. A soldier was wounded in that incident. Minutes later, the third Palestinian rammed a car into an army vehicle at the scene and was shot, the army said. Two soldiers were hurt in the second incident, the army said, adding that two knives were found on the motorist's body.