Woman who dreamed Muhammad sought her given 16 years for stabbing

A 23-year-old Israeli Arab woman was sentenced on Monday to a 16-year jail term and ordered to pay NIS 100,000 ($27,160) to her victim after being found guilty of attempting to murder a woman in the central Israeli city of Rosh Ha’ayin just under a year ago.

According to the charge sheet, Shtila Abu Iyada of Kafr Qassem dreamed that the Prophet Muhammad was looking for her against the backdrop of the wave of Palestinian terror attacks then sweeping Israel.

The dream encouraged her to become more religious and she decided to kill Jews in the name of Allah.

Prosecutor Oded Keller told the Lod District Court that Abu Iyada planned and tested various scenarios over a number of months.

She considered using an explosive device or carrying out a shooting attack. She also thought of planting a bomb in a restaurant.

On the day of the attack, last April, she set out with two knives to the Afeq industrial zone between Rosh HaAyin and Kafr Kassem and lunged at a 30-year-old female passerby, managing to lightly wound her in the left arm.

The victim screamed and fought back, sustaining a stab wound to her chest. When a male passerby tried to stop the attack by throwing a stone at Abu Iyada, the terrorist tried to stab him too.

A security guard from a nearby office block heard cries from the direction of the street and saw Abu Iyada brandishing the knife, screaming and trying to stab the woman, the court heard.

He ran over, pulled out his pistol and held it against the attacker’s head. Then, with the help of two civilians, he forced her onto the ground and disarmed her.

The victim was treated on site before being taken to Beilinson Hospital in Petah Tikva.

“She looked Arab, with a head covering, but didn’t seem suspicious,” the victim later told the Walla news site. “I was concentrating on my phone. She didn’t shout anything that gave her away, like ‘Allahu Akhbar.’”

The sentence was part of a plea bargain which saw Abu Iyada admitting to just one charge of attempted murder.

The attack formed part of a wave of Palestinian stabbings and car rammings that began in September 2015 and lasted through the first half of 2016.

From October 2015 to October 2016, 36 Israelis, two Americans and an Eritrean national were killed in stabbing, car-ramming and shooting attacks.

According to AFP figures, some 238 Palestinians, a Jordanian and a Sudanese migrant were also killed during the violent spurt, most of them in the course of carrying out attacks, Israel says, and many of the others in clashes with troops in the West Bank and at the Gaza border, as well as in Israeli airstrikes in the Strip.