Israel returns to PA bodies of Jaffa, Petah Tikva terrorists
One of bodies is that of Bashar Massalha, who killed US tourist Taylor Force in seafront rampage in March
Israel on Friday night returned to the Palestinian Authority the bodies of two terrorists, one belonging to a West Bank man who killed an American tourist during a stabbing spree in Jaffa two months ago.
Bashar Massalha, 22, from Qalqilya, murdered US citizen Taylor Force and injured 10 others in a rampage along the Jaffa boardwalk on March 8. He was killed by security forces at the scene of the attack, which coincided with a visit by US Vice President Joe Biden, who was meeting with Shimon Peres minutes away from the scene.
Force was a US Army veteran who had done tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan. He graduated from West Point Military Academy in 2009 and served as a field artillery officer from 2009 to 2014 at Fort Hood.
The Vanderbilt graduate student was repatriated three days after the attack, following a service at Ben Gurion Airport attended by American-born former MK Dov Lipman, Force’s friend and former West Point Military Academy classmate David Simpkins, and members of the US diplomatic corps and military in Israel.
The second terrorist, Abed el-Rahman Mahmoud Radad, 18, was killed by his victim in an attack in a Petah Tikva store also on March 8. Ultra-Orthodox Jew Yonatan Azarihab, who was collecting for charity at the time of the attack, pulled Radad’s knife out of his own neck and used it to stab and bring down his attacker.
“It’s a miracle. I wasn’t at all prepared for anything like that,” Azarihab told the Ynet news site from his hospital bed at Beilinson Hospital after the attack.
“I thought that was it, I wouldn’t live,” Azriaev told JTA in a bedside interview. “I saw he was fighting with someone else. When I saw that, I said, ‘I won’t live.’ So, I said, he shouldn’t kill more people.”
The Defense Ministry permits the return of bodies of terrorists killed at the scene by Israeli security forces on the condition that the funerals do not become mass gatherings, for fear that they will descend into violence.
Twenty-nine Israelis and four foreign nationals have been killed in Palestinian terrorism and violence since October 2015. Some 200 Palestinians have been killed, around two-thirds of them while attacking Israelis, and the rest during clashes with troops, according to the Israeli army.
The Times of Israel Community.