Adam’s deadly eve: 7 things to know for July 27

1. Israel was so busy worrying about problems with Gaza and the Golan Syria border, that a terror attack inside a settlement near Jerusalem Thursday night seemed to strike out of the blue.

• According to Haaretz, the last time there was a terror attack in Israel was in June, when a woman in Afula was stabbed.
• According to AFP, the last time there was a terror attack in the West Bank was April, when a Palestinian man tried to stab an Israeli at a gas station near Maale Adumim. However, Haaretz notes that an incident in which a Palestinian driver hit soldiers standing on the side of a road south of Jerusalem has been labeled a terror attack by the Defense Ministry, despite the driver turning himself in and saying the incident was an accident. (According to one person familiar with the incident, villagers knew the road was dark and dangerous and asked soldiers to not stand where it is hard for drivers to see them.)
• According to the Foreign Ministry, one needs to go yet another month back to March for the last time an Israeli was killed in a terror attack — the March 18 slaying of Adiel Kolman in Jerusalem’s Old City.
• Fighting terror / dealing with the Palestinians is apparently like riding a bike, though, and Israel snaps right back into terror-fighting mode, with raids on the suspect’s house, extra troops dispatched to the West Bank and calls for the Palestinian Authority to condemn the attack.

2. One needs to go back a year — almost exactly a year — to find a terror attack that so closely mirrors Thursday’s assault in Adam: the killing of three members of the Salomon family in Halamish.

• The army says it is looking into possible links between the two killers, both of whom hailed from a West Bank town called Kobar, though Israel Radio quotes the mayor of the town saying he doesn’t know of the two having been friends. (It’s not clear why a mayor would know about who various teens hang out with.)
• The connection runs deeper than just geographical proximity, though given similarities between the method of attack (hopping a fence into the settlement) and the fact that both apparently left Facebook “wills” prior to the attacks.
• Questions have arisen, though, over whether the Facebook post supposedly put up by Adam attacker Mohammed Tariq Yousef, was actually penned by him or was just photoshopped . Ynet reporter Elior Levy writes that the language in the missive seems well beyond the abilities of a 17-year-old village boy. “The text goes into the West Bankers and the PA ignoring the suffering in Gaza,” Levy notes.

3. The tabloid coverage of the attack is as pathos-driven as ever.

• Israel Hayom’s Ariel Kahane, who lives in Adam, gives a play-by-play account of running to hide after hearing of the intruder, and attempting to calm his children.
• “We feared this for years. Hundreds of times my friends drilled for neutralizing the attacker, dozens of times they were called to check out the fence because of a false alarm or someone breaking in with criminal intent. This time it was real,” he writes.
• Yedioth Ahronoth, publishing like the other papers before the most seriously injured stabbing victim was declared dead, tries to put a heroic spin on the story, with a front page headline reading “ The victim killed the terrorist,” referring to one of the people responding to the scene getting stabbed while he shot Yousef.
• “Three people walking on the street they lived on became knife terror victims,” the paper writes.

4. A West Bank attack doesn’t mean the other fronts are quiet, though. Haaretz reports that troops are gearing up for yet another violent Friday on the Gaza border, which has become a ritual in the never-ending outburst-ceasefire-outburst loop.

• Despite Hamas calling for mass demonstrations to avenge the deaths of three members killed in Israeli strikes on Wednesday, the paper notes that the army still thinks the terror group wants to keep tensions to a low simmer, noting the lack of immediate response to those deaths as proof.
• “The defense establishment’s assessment is that Hamas will try to maintain a low level of violence at these demonstrations, seeking to avoid an unwanted deterioration and a worsening of the humanitarian crisis in Gaza, which could lead to a civil uprising there.”
• Yedioth’s Alex Fishman writes that the IDF has not been disclosing incidents in which Hamas drones have repeatedly carried explosives into the same Gaza-area community. Reporting on the attacks for the first time, he says the drone threat is still clouded in secrecy and unknowns.
• “The IDF can’t say how many drones carrying explosives were launched over the last year from Gaza, how many of them returned to Gaza, and if this is the tip of a wave of explosive drones that will be used in the next round of violence. The working theory in the army’s southern command is that Hamas has the ability to deploy attack drones.”

5. The army has also been left with egg on its face after its inability to shoot down rockets from Syria was laid bare in two separate incidents last week.

• The army has still been unable to find two missiles that were apparently fired by Islamic State and landed in the Sea of Galilee, but former IDF intel chief Amos Yadlin tells ToI’s Jacob Magid that missile defense expectations may be too high.
• “Although Israel has a defense system for missiles and rockets that is among the best in the world, it cannot intercept anything in any place. This is an illusion,” he says.
• Yadlin also says he thinks the missiles were not stray fire, but shot on purpose to draw Israel into hitting the regime, as it normally does. Instead Israel hit the IS launcher.
• “I think that the intention was to cause harm, but these types of rockets are very, very inaccurate,” he says.

6. Might Israel soon be pining for the days of piddly IS missiles and Hamas drones? Australia’s ABC news reports that some in Australia’s government have gotten signals that US President Donald Trump is getting ready to bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities, possibly within weeks.

• The paper reports that Australia is getting involved because the US relies on it for intelligence on Iran, as part of the Five Eyes program which directs spy satellites.
• “The ABC has been told Australian defence facilities would likely play a role in identifying targets in Iran, as would British intelligence agencies,” the outlet notes.
• It also quotes a government source saying that Canberra considers the Five Eyes intel to be better than Israel’s, or at least more reliable.
• Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull was quick to dismiss the report, or at least say he has no reason to think Trump is getting ready to launch anything but angry tweets.
• “It’s speculation, it is citing anonymous sources,” he’s quoted as saying in the Guardian.

7. In Druze news, the protests over the nation-state law are continuing apace, but its not clear if they will bear any fruit.

• Yedioth reports that rather than fix the broken law, the coalition is considering yet more legislation, this time a basic law to accompany the nation-state bill that would enshrine the Druze minority’s rights.
• It’s unclear, though, how a new law instead of a fix will do anything but enshrine the place of the Druze as first runners-up after the Jews.
• “We can’t pass a Druze nation bill, because the Druze don’t even call themselves a nation,” the paper quotes a senior coalition source saying. “The point is to pass a basic law that will be equal in status to the nation-state law, to enshrine in law the status and rights of the Druze community in Israel. The law won’t be in place of the nation-state bill and won’t bypass it. It will be a ‘side’ law.”
• The paper notes that lawmakers were forced to get creative after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu put his foot down against inserting a fix to the existing law.
• In Israel Hayom, columnist Haim Shine takes it even further, insisting that the complaining about the nation-state bill is unwarranted: “I’ve read the bill again and again. As a veteran jurist, I just cannot understand why people are foaming at the mouths, crying and losing their breath over it.”
• Haaretz’s main editorial, meanwhile, says that fixing the law to help the Druze and other groups of “loyal” Arabs will end up doing more harm than good by further ranking the country’s sects.
• “The outcry to adapt the law so that it doesn’t harm the Druze, and perhaps also the Christian Arabs, the Circassians and the Bedouins serving in the army, and are thus included in the “good Arabs” classification, attests more than anything else to the undemocratic, un-Zionist worldview characterizing the rightist lawmakers,” the editorial reads.