27-Jul-16: The Hamas terrorists who murdered Rabbi Miki Mark are located and forcibly retired

In the PA-controlled village of Surif this morning, the body of a
terrorist gunman is removed by IDF soldiers [Image Source]

Violent riots erupted in the PA-controlled village of Surif, north of Hebron, early this morning (Wednesday) as a joint IDF, Shin Bet and Israel Police operation trapped the four-person terror cell that murdered Rabbi Michael Mark, the executive director of the Otniel Hesder Yeshiva, on July 1 [link] and seriously injured his wife and children. The victims of that attack were traveling in a car that came under murderous gunfire on Route 60 ["01-Jul-16: The drive-by shooting near Otniel"].

Times of Israel reports that the members of the Hamas-aligned terror cell

opened fire at the Israeli troops from inside the house in which he was hiding, and the IDF responded by firing several anti-tank missiles... The IDF then used a bulldozer to knock down most of the building, and when the troops finally entered the destroyed home they found Fakih dead inside...

One of the cell members, Muhammad al-Fakih, 29, died and three others were taken into custody, unharmed. According to Reuters this morning

Islamist group Hamas identified the man killed in the raid as Mohammad al-Fakih and it said he was a member of its armed wing, the al-Qassam Brigades

The Ma'an News Agency version follows the customary template, starting with the title of the piece: "Palestinian accused of Hebron shooting killed after Israeli forces bombard house":

The Palestinian Ministry of Health reported that five Palestinians were shot with rubber-coated bullets during clashes in Surif. [IDF Spokesperson Avichai Edre'i] confirmed that a Palestinian woman sustained minor wounds during the military attack and was taken to a hospital for treatment, adding that a Kalashnikov machine gun and a grenade were found in the house. Locals said Israeli forces detained four Palestinians from Surif during the raid, identified as Ahmad Ibrahim al-Hur, Diyaa Khalid Ghneimat, and Muhammad Ali al-Heeh, the owner of the demolished house in which Faqih was hiding. Al-Heeh’s mother was also detained... Faqih himself was from the village of Dura in southern Hebron. [Ma'an, July 28, 2016]

The Arabic edition of the Ma'an story, again following the customary approach of one version for the Arabic speakers, a specifically different and carefully sanitized one for foreigners, says

The [Israeli] army claimed to find gun-type rifles and grenades next to the martyr... ["Martyrdom of a citizen after bombing and besieging of a home in Surif", Ma'an Arabic, July 28, 2016]

A martyr al-Fakih assuredly is becoming as we write these lines. Hamas, which de facto controls large swathes of the nominally Fatah/PA towns and villages of the mis-named "West Bank" (a name given to it for the first time by the Jordanian occupation forces who conquered it militarily in the course of the 1947-49 War of Independence in which the most of the Arab world sought to destroy the nascent state of Israel), is active now preparing for a showcase funeral and demonstrations of rage and power. These, as always, are intended not only as a token of how far away peace is, but to show that the PA - with all its foreign aid, its police and its European-supplied limousines for insiders - actually takes a back seat to the Hamas organizers on the ground.

28-Apr-16: Terror-by-knifing attack foiled at Qalandiya; assailant, again, is a child

The attackers came equipped with these stabbing
implements - two identical kitchen knives
and a switchblade found on the body of the young male
[Image Source: Israel Police]

A violent attack at the Qalandiya security checkpoint yesterday (Wednesday) on Jerusalem's north side has cost a pair of Palestinian Arabs, a young married woman and her teenage brother, their lives.

Times of Israel reports that, while no Israelis from among the security personnel attacked suffered any injuries, the two assailants, armed with knives, were killed after attempting to attack the heavily-armed Israelis.

The attackers are identified as Maram Salih Hassan Abu Ismail, a woman of 23, and her brother Ibrahim Saleh Taha, 16. Both are said to be from Surif, an Arab community located south of Jerusalem and north of Hebron. Ma'an News Agency says the woman is the mother of two children and pregnant with a third.

Surif is familiar to Israelis with a sense of history. It is home to most of the Arab mob who carried out a total massacre of the convoy of Jews (among them Frimet Roth's cousin Eliyahu Herskowitz ז"ל) known as the Lamed Heh. Its 35 members had set out on foot in January 1948 with the goal of relieving the Arab siege on the Gush Etzion communities. Those beleagured communities, numerically overwhelmed by the surrounding enemies, eventually fell to the invading the Arab Legion, the military arm of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, on Friday May 14, 1948, some hours before Israel’s independence was declared in Tel Aviv. They remained, judenrein, under Jordanian military occupation for the next 19 years. The massacre and then capture of the Gush was "one of the major episodes of the State of Israel-in-the-making", playing a significant role in Israeli collective memory. Wikipedia reminds us that the post-1967 revival and massive flourishing of the Gush Etzion communities is regarded as deeply symbolic, linked in the Israeli psyche to the massive loss of life in Israel's War of Independence.

Ynet's report of yesterday's terrorist attack says the Arab couple

attempted to walk through a passage intended for vehicle entry and began speeding up in the direction of Border policemen stationed at the scene. The female assailant had her hand in her bag in which there was a knife. The male assailant's hand was held behind his back which aroused the security forces suspicion. The police called upon them to stop several times. However they continued to quickly approach in their direction. The police continued to call upon them to stop and throw down the bag the woman was holding. The woman stopped close to the Border policemen, both of them took several steps backwards and then suddenly they turned towards the forces, the woman took out a knife and threw it straight at the policeman closest to her. The policeman was not injured. The security forces acted quickly and shot them dead. A search of the area revealed that in addition to the woman's knife, the male had a similar knife in his belt, as well as a pocket knife.

As always, there's an air of Rashomon ("alternative, self-serving and contradictory versions of the same incident" embodying "multiple eye-witness testimonies of an event contain conflicting information") already evident in parts of the media.

Arabic-language audiences are getting a sadly-familiar-sounding narrative at considerable odds with the Israel Police and media accounts. An Iranian news source calls yesterday's thwarted terror attack a "massacre". A Gazan source refers to a "child martyr", and martyr-posters are, not surprisingly, online [here] already. Al Safir, a Palestinian Arab news outlet, calls what happened an "execution". So does this Gulf news source. For Aljazeera, it's about the woman's orphaned children, and the death of a younger brother. As far as we can tell, none of those Arabic reports shows the knives that were removed from the clutches of the attackers.

As usual, the events we see as terrorism are described by the Arab and Muslim media to Arab news consumers context-free form, devoid of connection to the ongoing wave of knifings, rammings, shootings, bombings. Forgotten for the moment are the multiple public acts of glorification of women, sub-teen and teenage children enjoying the acclaim of Arabs and Moslems from across the spectrum - and at the highest levels of Palestinian Arab power - for the violence of their usually-pointless murderous assaults on Jews. It's an ongoing tragedy for all concerned.

Haaretz says

Hassan Tahah, another sibling, told Haaretz that he doesn't believe his sister was planning to carry out an attack. "We have no details about what transpired and no one briefed us, but I don't believe this whole terrorist attack story," he said. According to him, his sister was on her way to a doctor's appointment, accompanied by his brother. "She was probably lost, or didn't understand what was going on at the roadblock, and the soldiers shot her and my brother," he said.

We wrote about another terror-minded sixteen year-old from Surif with a knife in the wake of an earlier attack ["23-Oct-15: Scenes from a stabbing/ramming/shooting war of terror"] some months ago. And for a sense of some of the numerous recent Arab-on-Israeli attacks at Qalandiya, click here.

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.