Man hurt in Jerusalem terror stabbing; Palestinian attacker, 14, caught
64-year-old in moderate condition; East Jerusalem teen flees scene, is captured a short while later
Emanuel (Mannie) Fabian is The Times of Israel's military correspondent
An Israeli man was stabbed and moderately hurt in a terror attack carried out by a Palestinian teenager in East Jerusalem on Wednesday, police and medics said.
Tzvi Tal, 64, was waiting at a bus station in northeast Jerusalem’s Neve Yaakov neighborhood when a 14-year-old Palestinian from East Jerusalem attacked him.
The Magen David Adom ambulance service said its medics took him to Hadassah Hospital Mount Scopus in the capital. The medical center said he was listed in moderate condition.
Police said officers detained the alleged stabber.
The teenager, a resident of the Kafr Aqab neighborhood, had initially fled the scene after stabbing the man but was caught a short while later in the area.
Law enforcement officials described the stabbing as a terror attack.
“I was waiting at the station for my bus and suddenly I felt someone slap me on the back,” Tal told reporters from his hospital bed. “I turned around and saw that he was running away, and I felt like something had been left in my back and realized that there was a knife there.”
As he was alone at the bus stop at the time, Tal said he resorted to trying to flag down cabs and other vehicles in the street to seek help, although many passed by without stopping as the knife was not visible to them and they did not realize he had been stabbed.
He said the assailant was at the bus station with him and that he assumed the teenager was also waiting for the bus, but in the end “he was waiting for me.”
Tal, an ultra-Orthodox Jew, warned “We’re sitting on a powder keg” in Jerusalem, and attributed his escape with relatively minor injuries to a higher power.
“The reason things like this don’t happen every other second is because someone is watching over us, making sure that it doesn’t,” he said.
The attack came less than a day after a Palestinian teenager stabbed and seriously wounded a soldier in the northern West Bank. Earlier Wednesday, hospital officials said the soldier’s condition had improved.
Tensions between Israelis and Palestinians have risen in the West Bank and East Jerusalem since the outbreak of the war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza following the October 7 massacre, which saw Hamas terrorists kill about 1,200 people and kidnap 253.
