Border policewoman honored for shooting attacker

A border policewoman who shot dead a Palestinian as he attacked a fellow officer with a fake gun was honored with a citation for excellence at a police awards ceremony on Monday where she was the only woman to receive a medal.

Officer Nofar Mizrahi was commended for her prompt actions during the incident when she opened fire on the attacker after he leveled a pistol at the head of one of her subordinates. The weapon was later found to be a fake.

“The ceremony was a very moving occasion for me, I brought pride to the unit and all the female fighters,” Mizrahi said according to a report from Army Radio. “It wasn’t strange for me to be the only woman at the ceremony where there were dozens of other special stories, and that is proof that the Israeli police is doing what is required of it.”

Mizrahi is currently in an officers training course and intends to make a career within the police.

The event occurred on December 12, 2012 at a police post in the West Bank town of Hebron.

Speaking after the incident Mizrahi recounted the events in interviews with Israeli media saying that she and two border police soldiers under her command were manning a checkpoint near the Cave of the Patriarchs when a young man, later identified as 17-year-old Muhammad Ziyad Saleimah, approached them.

“Following the standard procedure, the soldier who was with me asked him for an ID,” she said. “The Palestinian handed him his documents and I entered the room to run a background check.”

While inside, she continued, she looked out and saw that the Palestinian had charged the soldier and drawn what appeared to be a pistol.

“With one hand,” she related, “he grabbed the soldier’s neck and pressed against him, and with the other he put the pistol to the soldier’s temple. In that situation, the soldier couldn’t break free or react.”

The female officer, who was only a few meters away, cocked her weapon.

“I was looking for an angle from which to fire without hurting the soldier,” she said, and it was only after she ascertained that his life was in danger that she pulled the trigger.

“After the first shot, he continued to hold the pistol to the soldier’s temple, so I fired two more bullets,” she said, at which point the Palestinian fell to the ground, and she quickly kicked the gun away. A police sapper who examined the pistol found it was a replica.

The police later released a security camera video of the incident.

In the days that followed, a picture of Mizrahi was circulated by pro-Palestinian groups on the Internet with a demand to “bring the killer to trial before international courts.”