Lod stabbing attacker arrested

The Shin Bet reveals that a stabbing in the city of Lod last Monday, in which a Jewish woman was moderately hurt, was in fact a terror attack, allegedly carried out by a 19-year-old Palestinian.

The suspect, Malek Bassem Ismail Saada, was picked up a day after the attack, the security service says, but details of the case were not revealed to the public.

According to the Shin Bet, Saada carried out the attack “because he was tired of his life” and hoped he would be killed by police, in a so-called suicide by cop.

The Palestinian teenager brought a knife with him to a parking garage in Lod just before 8:30 p.m. on Monday. When he spotted a woman with her hair covered, which identified her as a religious Jewish woman, Saada ran after her and — shouting a sentence in Arabic — stabbed her in the upper body, the Shin Bet said.

Saada fled the scene, but was arrested as he made his way back to his home in the West Bank town of Halhul.

“This is another case of a Palestinian deciding to carry out a terror attack as a solution to his personal problems,” the Shin Bet says.

— Judah Ari Gross