16-Aug-18: The victim of an Arab-on-Israeli vehicle-ramming tonight is a young woman [Multiple UPDATES]

Israel National News has reported tonight (Thursday) that an Israeli woman was killed in a vehicle-ramming attack in Israel's Samaria district:

A young woman in her 20s was murdered in a ramming terrorist attack that took place Thursday night near Havat Gilad in Samaria. Magen David Adom paramedics attempted to resuscitate the victim, but were forced to declare her death. The assailant fled the scene. IDF forces began searching the area. In January, Rabbi Raziel Shevach of Havat Gilad was murdered in a drive-by shooting attack.

We hope they're wrong about her condition. Times of Israel describes the victim as being alive but in  a very bad way. A MaarivOnline tweet says the attack happened at 9:32 pm tonight.

We wrote about how six more Israeli children - Renana, 10; Naomi, 8; Miriam, 6; Malka, 5; Ovadia, 3; and Benayahu, 10 months - all from Havat Gil'ad, became orphans in that January 2018 vehicle ramming at the same spot as tonight's - see "10-Jan-18: Hamas praises a murderous drive-by shooting that orphans six young Israeli children". The attacker was eliminated in a shoot-out with Israeli security forces a few weeks after that ramming murder.

Sorry to say, Ynet says tonight's Israeli victim has died. It adds

"The driver fled the scene, with the IDF suspected he escaped to the nearby Palestinian village of Jit."

UPDATE: At the Jerusalem Post in a report published around 10:20 pm tonight, they're not sure if this was a terror attack:

An Israeli woman was killed in a hit-and-run incident near the Havat Gilad outpost in the Samaria region of the West Bank. It was not immediately clear if it was a vehicular attack or a car accident. The woman was hit as she crossed Route [blank] near the outpost. The car appeared to be a Palestinian taxi, which fled the scene...  According to KAN Radio, the Palestinian driver was afraid to stop. He drove straight to the nearby Palestinian city of Nablus and turned himself into the police there, where he clarified that the incident was an accident. A Magen David Adom paramedic said that the woman was found unconscious in a ditch and had sustained massive injuries. She was not breathing nor did she have a heart beat, the paramedic said. They were unable to revive her and she was declared dead at the scene.

UPDATE Friday August 17, 2018  at 7:00 am: According to a Times of Israel update, the victim is a woman "in her forties" from the Israeli community of Emmanuel. Her name is not yet published as "some family members were still being sought to notify them of the death".

UPDATE Friday August 17, 2018 at 2:00 pm: The Israeli victim struck in last night's incident is named today as 42-year-old Hava Roizen. Roizen was struck by the vehicle on Route 60, near the Havat Gilad outpost. She was declared dead by the Magen David Adom ambulance service after paramedics were unable to resuscitate her. Times of Israel says 

Following a preliminary investigation, the army said it was “highly likely” that the fatal crash was a hit-and-run incident rather than a terror attack. The driver fled the scene and was later spotted near the Palestinian village of Jit where he turned himself in to Palestinian Authority police. A senior PA official told the Times of Israel the driver was a 63-year-old male who insisted what happened had been an accident and not an attack. The official added that the man would remain in the custody of the PA police and would be dealt with by the PA judicial system. “I was afraid that if I stopped they would kill me, so I fled,” the driver told Palestinian police, according to Hebrew media reports.  Roizen was a resident of the small ultra-Orthodox settlement of Emmanuel...  An immigrant from the former Soviet Union, Roizen worked as a photographer, frequently hitchhiking around the country to events, an Emmanuel resident [said] “She was incredibly dedicated to her job. She’d travel wherever it was necessary, and I’d often see her returning to Emmanuel at very late hours,” he said, referring to Roizen and her husband as humble people.While military sources said the preliminary investigation found that the incident was a hit-and-run, they had not definitely ruled out the possibility that it was a terror attack.

As to whether terror was involved, the chairman of the Shomron Regional Council Yossi Dagan is quoted:

"From the point of view of the military commanders in the field, and from our point of view as well, this is a terror attack for all intents and purposes,” he claimed. The settler leader pointed out that the junction is well lit and that there were no skid marks or other signs that the driver had tried to come to a sudden halt. “This is another terror attack, a cold-blooded murder of a Samaria resident on a central road in the State of Israel.”

UPDATE Wednesday September 12, 2018
Times of Israel reports today that the Palestinian Arab driver of the vehicle that allegedly struck Hava Roizen and killed her

was indicted Wednesday for a hit-and-run, ruling out speculations of a terror motive in the incident. The death... last month was initially reported as a possible car-ramming attack, though police said at the time that it was more likely to have been an accident. The indictment against Kamal Kadari, 60, was filed at the IDF’s Samaria Military Court, charging him with negligent homicide and abandoning the scene of an accident, the Kan public radio broadcaster reported. Kadari, who turned himself in to the Palestinian Authority police after the incident, remains in PA custody... Kadari, who had five passengers in his car at the time, did not notice the Israeli woman in the road, the report said... Kadari fled the scene and was later spotted near the Palestinian village of Jit, where he gave himself up to PA police.

21-Jan-18: Friday's terror and the lens of history

The security checkpoint, one of several in the vicinity of the ancient Tomb
of the Patriarchs, where the woman and her two knives were
intercepted on Friday [Image Source]

We happen to live in a land richer in history than almost anywhere else on earth. The fact that we share much of it with people whose beliefs bring some of them to self-destructive acts of violence against us is one of the tragic aspects of that specialness and causes a large measure of that history to have heavily violent overlays.

This past Friday gave us three reminders. Two have strong scriptural resonances.

Regular readers will be aware of how often the ancient Tomb of the Patriarchs (Hebrew: Ma'arat Hamachpelah, in recognition of its name according to Bereishit/Genesis 23, when our patriarch Avraham purchased it for full value, 400 pieces of silver) in Hebron has been a target for armed, terror-minded Palestinian Arabs with mayhem on their minds.

You can see some of our earlier reports of attacks in that sacred place, most of them thwarted, by clicking on the index term Tomb of the Prophets. There was yet another this past Friday afternoon. Israel National News reports that the would-be attacker was, once again,

a Palestinian Arab woman who was armed with two knives... The Border Police officers asked the woman to undergo a security inspection when she tried to escape the checkpoint. The officers arrested her and asked her to reveal the items she had been carrying. The suspect, who took out a knife, was asked by one of the officers to empty her bag, and when she did, another knife fell to the floor. The Border Police said that the circumstances of the incident and the knives found in the woman’s possession indicate that she was planning to carry out a stabbing attack. The suspect, a resident of Idna in her 30s, was transferred for further interrogation by the security forces.

The Palestinian Arab news company, Ma'an News Agency, says this about the thwarted attack:

Wafa [an arm of the Palestinian Authority] reported that a Palestinian woman was detained by Israeli forces for alleged possession of a knife. According to Wafa, the 32-year-old woman was detained after she was searched at the entrance of the Ibrahimi mosque in Hebron’s old city... Israeli forces have detained scores of Palestinians, many of the minors, for allegedly being in possession of knives following a spate of alleged and actual small-scale knife attacks by Palestinians that surged in the fall of 2015... Eyewitnesses have also said in a number of cases that Israeli security forces planted knives on slain or imprisoned Palestinians to claim that they were acting in self-defense during a stabbing attack.

What's the attraction of the Tomb of the Patriarchs? First, it's considered the most ancient, continuously-used prayer structure in the world, though the building resting on top of it - a mosque which had been converted from a large rectangular Herodian-era Judean structure, in Wikipedia's words - is relatively new, only about 850 years. It's also the place where, continuously for nearly 4,000 years, Jews have revered the burial sites of  three patriarchal couples: Avraham and Sarah, Yitzhak and Rivka, Ya'akov and Leah.

Times of Israel reports on another attack - this one not thwarted - earlier the same day. An IDF service member was injured

in an attempted car-ramming attack in the Jordan Valley. The incident took place near the entrance to the Qasr al-Yahud baptismal holy site near Jericho. The vehicle did not have the necessary permit to enter the site and did not stop when soldiers flagged it down, an army spokeswoman said. Security forces detained the driver for questioning and the lightly injured soldier was treated at the scene of the incident.

The attack was caught by an Israeli security camera:

Video source (There's a zoom-in video view of the same attack here)

Qasr al-Yahud is an Arabic name. It means Castle of the Jews and is believed to have that name because, in a less-politically-fraught era, the Arabs acknowledged that the site, a short walk from the Jordan River, is where according to tradition Joshua led the Children of Israel in the final stage of their forty-year-long journey from bondage in Egypt to freedom, autonomy and dominion in the Land of Israel. Right afterwards, they conquered (still) nearby Jericho.

The website of the Israel Nature and Parks Authority refers to its significance to another religion:

Christian tradition marks this site as the place of the “spiritual birth” of Jesus, as opposed to his physical birth in Bethlehem. As such, the baptismal site is of great sacred significance - the third holiest site in the Christian world (after the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem).

For Friday's vehicle-rammer, religious faith may well have played a role. But its details are not likely to be explained on any tourist site.

Also on Friday, according to Ma'an, forces of the IDF arrested four Palestinian Arabs in pre-dawn raids in al-Yamoun, a village north of Jenin:

The detainees were identified as brothers Jihad and Abd al-Qader Freihat. Israeli forces confiscated mobile phones and surveillance camera recordings from their house during the raid. Two other residents of al-Yamoun, identified as Yahiya Abu al-Haija and Mustafa al-Karam. The two were detained during a raid on the Jenin refugee camp... A Palestinian from the Wadi Burqin neighborhood of Jenin, just outside the Jenin refugee camp, was killed during a predawn raid on Thursday. The slain Palestinian, Ahmad Ismail, 30, was killed during an alleged shootout, as Israeli forces were conducting raids in search of Palestinians allegedly suspected to be involved in the shooting of an Israeli settler last week near Nablus.

WAFA says today that IDF raids in the same general area have continued into today (Sunday). Both those Palestinian Arab media channels are evidently too delicate to connect the arrests and raids with a specific act of murder. But it's clear they mean the cold-blooded killing of Rabbi Raziel Shevach HY"D from Havat Gilad ["10-Jan-18: Hamas praises a murderous drive-by shooting that orphans six young Israeli children"] nearly two weeks ago in the area of Nablus, or Shechem as we knew it in Hebrew.

It's where, according to the Torah,the Alm-ghty appeared to Avraham and first promised that “To your offspring I will give this land”, a promise that has been integral to the traditions of Jewish history ever since.

10-Jan-18: Hamas praises a murderous drive-by shooting that orphans six young Israeli children

Today's funeral in Havat Gilad [Image Source]

Six more Israeli children - Renana, 10; Naomi, 8; Miriam, 6; Malka, 5; Ovadia, 3; and Benayahu, 10 months - all from Havat Gil'ad, have just become orphans in yet another Arab-on-Israeli drive-by shooting murder - the latest to join a tragic history such attacks.

Their father is being buried as we enter this text. (His is the Havat Gilad community's first funeral.) His wife Yael now faces challenges as a young widow that no one should ever know.

Around 8 pm last night (Tuesday), on Route 60, a major highway in the Samaria district of Israel that runs north-south between Beer Sheva and Nazareth via Jerusalem, a shooter armed with a gun opened fire from his moving vehicle in the direction of the car of Rabbi Raziel Shevach, a remarkable man of 35:

Rabbi Shevach was a mohel, taught children in the community and also served as a volunteer in the regional health service. He had been a resident of Havat Gilad for 10 years... [Hamodia, January 10, 2018]

Shot in the neck, Rabbi Shevach managed to phone his wife. She raised the alarm and help was dispatched. Times of Israel says

civilian and military medics rushed to the scene and tried to stop the bleeding as they took him to Kfar Saba’s Meir Hospital, where he was pronounced dead after life-saving efforts failed. Immediately following the attack, troops launched a manhunt, setting up roadblocks in the area around the Palestinian city of Nablus as they looked for the perpetrators.

Rabbi Shevach in his Magen David Adom
ambulance brigade uniform [Image Source]

The hunt was aided by ad hoc IDF security checks that were put in place at the entrances to and exits from nearby Nablus and forces manned security crossings across the city, according to the military spokesperson. Israeli special forces joined the search, entering nearby Palestinian Arab villages to seek the attackers.

As of this morning (Wednesday), the army has said it is expanding the search and bringing in reinforcements. Attacks of this kind are often described as the work of lone-wolf operators. Much of the time, a cell of terrorists is revealed and a supply chain and operational command that stretch beyond our borders and into foreign countries. Too soon to eliminate any theories.

A Facebook post on Monday (in Hebrew) reported that a Jewish resident of the nearby Yitzhar community, driving in his car, saw another vehicle pull up next to him. The other driver brandished a pistol but was unable to fire for reasons unknown.

The terrorists of Hamas issued a statement last night (says Times of Israel) praising the attack, calling it “heroic” and warning that it is "a sign of future attacks to come". Another source quotes part of their message calling the murder:

heroic action, that came as a result of Israel’s crimes against our people in the West Bank, Jerusalem and the Al-Aqsa Mosque. 

Hamas stopped short of taking responsibility for the lethal terror attack. This doesn't mean they are uninvolved. And it certainly shouldn't be understood as a specific response to some specific complaint. The Palestinian Arab terrorist forces seek Israeli and Jewish victims always and everywhere, and have done for generations.

UPDATE Tuesday February 6, 2018: A JTA report today ["Israeli forces kill head of terror cell behind Gilad Farm rabbi’s murder"] says that as a result of a joint effort by the Israel Security Agency (the Shin Bet), the Israel Defense Forces and the Israel Police,

"Israeli security forces shot and killed the Palestinian terrorist behind the murder of an Israeli father of six. Nearly a month after Rabbi Raziel Shevach was killed in a drive-by attack at the Gilad Farms outpost junction in the northern West Bank, Ahmed Nassar Jarrar, a resident of Jenin, was killed Tuesday morning, the Israel Security Agency said in a statement. Jarrar was the head of the terrorist cell that perpetrated the January 9 shooting and personally participated in the attack, according to the statement.  Jarrar was killed during an attempt to arrest him in the village of Yamoun, near Jenin, where he was hiding. An M-16 rifle and an explosives pack were found with him when he was killed. Other cell members who have been arrested have told investigators that the cell was involved in other attempts to plan and carry out terror attacks. A gag order has been placed on any additional details..."