As victim’s condition stabilizes, IDF raids Yavneh terrorist’s hometown

The IDF on Thursday raided the West Bank hometown of a Palestinian terrorist who stabbed and critically injured an Israeli supermarket worker the day before.

The army did not make any arrests in the early-morning raid, an IDF spokesperson said, but soldiers entered the homes of the terrorist’s family members in an apparent search for contraband.

On Wednesday morning, just before noon, Ismail Ibrahim Ismail Abu Aram, 19, attacked an employee of a Shufersal supermarket, stabbing him multiple times in the chest, neck and head. The brutal attack was captured by the store’s security camera (warning: graphic content).

Abu Aram fled the scene but was tackled and pinned to the ground by civilian bystanders until police arrived and arrested him.

The 43-year-old victim was rushed to the nearby Kaplan Medical Center with life-threatening injuries, a hospital spokesperson said.

After an hours-long operation to stop the bleeding and repair the damage caused by Abu Aram’s attack, the victim’s condition stabilized, but remained serious, according to Dr. Doron Shindel, the head of Kaplan’s head and throat surgery department.

“He is being monitored and is receiving treatment in the intensive care unit. He is still unconscious and hooked up to a ventilator, and within the next few hours he will be brought back to an operating room to finish the surgery process,” Shindel said in a statement Thursday morning.

Shortly after the attack on Wednesday, the IDF raided Abu Aram’s home in the West Bank town of Yatta, also arresting no one.

A few hours later, the army placed a cordon around the village. All traffic coming in and out of Yatta was being checked in a measure referred to by the army as a “breathing closure,” the IDF said in a statement.

In the past two years of increased violence in the West Bank and Israel, several Palestinian terrorists have come from Yatta, notably the two gunmen who carried out the Sarona Market terror attack in June 2016, in which four people were killed and over a dozen wounded.

During a wave of violence starting October 2015, Israeli forces regularly placed cordons around Palestinian towns after attacks, in a measure critics derided as collective punishment against residents.

According to the Shin Bet security service, Abu Aram entered Israel illegally, without a required permit. He had no history of terror activity and was transferred to the Shin Bet security service for questioning.

Police placed a gag order on other details of the investigation into the stabbing attack, notably on the circumstances of how Abu Aram entered Israel and who helped him to do so.