A heroine’s death

The death of a border policewomen barely out of basic training in an attack in Jerusalem dominates the news coverage on Thursday in Israel and whips the tabloids into an outraged fervor. More questions than answers remain about how the three-man cell coordinated the attack, obtained the weapons and managed to get into Jerusalem.

“Heroine,” reads the front page of both Israel Hayom and Yedioth Ahronoth, while Haaretz points out on its front page that the Border Police soldier and her comrades hadn’t even finished basic training when they were put out on the streets of Jerusalem and attacked by a group of armed Palestinian attackers.

Israel Hayom calls the attack that left 19-year-old Hadar Cohen dead and a fellow Border Police soldier seriously injured “the most sophisticated in the current wave of terror” and says it had the potential to be far more deadly. The three assailants were armed with improvised guns, knives and pipe bombs and attacked a group of Border Police officers outside Jerusalem’s Damascus Gate. The first two attempted to stab and shoot officers, then the third opened fire, shooting Cohen.

Haaretz reports that police security footage from the scene of the attack shows that Cohen managed to fire her weapon before she was shot by the third gunman.

Yedioth Ahronoth mentions another hero of the day: a Border Police officer at the scene who was released from service three years earlier, then reenlisted a week before the attack. He shot one of the three attackers dead during the attack.

“My mandatory service in the Border Police was significant and full of a feeling of purpose in an extraordinary way,” he tells the paper. “Therefore I felt obliged to return to service and continue to protect the citizens of the State of Israel.”

Israel Hayom’s Yoav Limor points out that this attack was the first involving a group of armed terrorists operating in a coordinated fashion, “albeit without any affiliation to one of the major terrorist organizations.”

Unlike the “lone wolf” attacks of the past several months, “this was the work of a group, whose members brandished more than knives: They used automatic weapons and were carrying pipe bombs to maximize casualties. This was also not a localized attack, one carried out near a military checkpoint. They were targeting Jerusalem, no doubt to maximize the impact, both figuratively and literally,” he writes.

“Given Palestinian youths’ penchant for imitation,” he says, “we can expect to see a series of copycats who will undoubtedly try to follow in the groups’ nefarious footsteps.”

Haaretz’s Nir Hasson writes that the attack took place four months to the day from a deadly stabbing on October 3 just footsteps from the Damascus Gate that left two Israelis dead. Since then, he calculates, there have been 34 attacks in Jerusalem, nine of them in the vicinity of the Damascus Gate, and a great many within a few hundred meters of the locus.

Hasson quotes the Arab coffee shop owner next to the Damascus Gate plaza as saying that this attack was different from the rest. “This time we heard many shots, it wasn’t like kids with knives, you see that it’s going to more severe places,” Mohammad Qostiru says. “I think that now people are casting aside the knife and taking up the rifle, [and] this means that we’re passing into a new phase.”

Yedioth Ahronoth’s Yossi Yehoshua makes a similar argument, calling the attack a “turning point.” While it may not be the work of Hamas or any other Palestinian terrorist groups, he says the connection that brought the three attackers together is Facebook. He quotes the head of the IDF’s Binyamin Brigade in the West Bank as saying it’s Facebook, more than Hamas or Fatah, that’s driving terrorism against Israel. The signal corps can’t nail down every post that could be a potential attacker. (TV reports Wednesday night said one of the three killers had posted on Facebook that intended to carry out a shooting attack.)

He dares to ask what everybody else in the country is asking: Why was Hadar Cohen, a raw recruit, stationed in the most terror attack-prone place in Jerusalem, if not the entirety of Israel and the West Bank?