A rude, painful surprise
A stabbing near Hadera takes the country aback even during the current wave of violence, as the attacker hails from Israel and a victim was wounded on her 15th birthday
Ilan Ben Zion is an AFP reporter and a former news editor at The Times of Israel.
Sunday night’s stabbing near the city of Hadera, along the coast, may just be the latest in an ever-growing litany of violent Palestinian attacks targeting Israelis, but if it bleeds and leads. What’s especially shocking is that the attacker was a resident of Umm al-Fahm, an Arab town in Israel.
Four Israelis, including a soldier, were attacked outside Kibbutz Gan Shmuel. The attacker, a 20-year-old Palestinian with an Israeli ID originally from the West Bank, struck one victim with his car, then exited the vehicle and stabbed three others. The incident’s sheer violence leads it to completely eclipse an attack earlier on Sunday near Jerusalem, in which a police officer suffered minor burns after a Palestinian woman attempted to blow up a gas canister in the back of her car.
The tabloids try to put a human face on the four victims of the attack, reporting that the 15-year-old moderately injured in the incident was celebrating her birthday. Israel Hayom reports that Liat Shama was standing at the bus stop on Route 65, birthday cake in hand and flowers in her hair, when the Palestinian attacker struck.
“I was on the way home when I heard the noise of a car,” a bystander, Benayahu Arazi, tells the paper. “I saw a man strike a girl, who I understood afterwards was celebrating her birthday and was stabbed in the shoulder. I sat on the terrorist, who held a knife in his hand and shouted ‘Allahu akbar.’ Another civilian joined and tried to take the knife from him. The terrorist struggled the whole time and wouldn’t relent.”
Yedioth Ahronoth quotes Liat’s mother recounting how her daughter, after being stabbed, ran into the road and told drivers to stay back. One of the vehicles took her to the hospital. Yael is quoted saying that “she was stabbed all over her body, in the head, the neck, the chest. Eight stab wounds. Someone was apparently watching over her in honor of her birthday. Now she’s on painkillers. Apparently he was paying attention [to her]. I’m very proud of my daughter.”
With the condemnations pouring in, Israel Hayom makes special mention that “even the Arab members of Knesset themselves actually condemned the act.” Joint (Arab) List leader Ayman Odeh called it “a terrible attack on civilians” saying, “This is not our way and never was.”
Yedioth Ahronoth, for its part, reports that the police commander who arrived at the scene was the first Muslim Israeli Arab to reach the rank of major general, the third-highest in the Israel Police. The paper says that 57-year-old Jamal Hakroush “had to deal with the difficult terrorist attack, which combined vehicular assault and stabbing, and was carried out by an Israeli Arab.”
“We in the Israel Police will continue along with other security organizations to concentrate operational and intelligence efforts in order to prevent any attempt to harm Israeli citizens, and we’ll take care to bring to justice all those who are arrested,” Hakroush said at the scene.
But Haaretz attempts to paint a more complete picture, reporting in its front-page coverage of the day’s violence that skirmishes between Israeli security forces and Palestinian rioters left 300 injured, according to the Red Crescent (of those, 120 from live fire and rubber bullets), and that a 13-year-old Palestinian boy was shot dead. That only finds mention at the very bottom of an article in Israel Hayom, and if it’s mentioned at all in Yedioth Ahronoth, they’ve done a good job of hiding it.
The teen was reportedly shot in the neck and seriously hurt during clashes with the IDF near the West Bank town of al-Bireh Sunday afternoon, and he died shortly thereafter, the paper cites Palestinian reports saying. The IDF tells the paper in response that there were violent riots in the area and attempts to throw Molotov cocktails at Israeli vehicles, and that the incident was under investigation.
For the first time in ages, Israel Hayom doesn’t have much commentary on the ongoing violence plaguing Israel and the West Bank. Yedioth Ahronoth makes up for it, however, with Eitan Haber giving the men and women in blue uniforms a pat on the back for their service to the country. He writes that Israelis don’t appreciate the police force enough and don’t express the gratitude they deserve. “And we always have complaints about police: they write too many traffic tickets. They’re not considerate. They don’t arrive in a timely manner after a break-in. Internal security is neglected,” he says, listing legitimate shortcomings.
“But the reality is completely different,” he says, arguing that cops are always on call and don’t get a fair salary. “In recent weeks thousands of police officers were called up to protect us,” he says. They do it while constantly standing in the strong sun and cold of Jerusalem” — whose weather, in fact, has been pleasantly mild in recent weeks — guarding and occasionally getting stabbed and possibly handicapped for life.
Despite their travails, Haber writes, they get no thanks, so he offers his.
