Minister calls to expel truck attacker’s family to Syria
Former Shin Bet chief: We will console the families of the terror victims — and continue to build in Jerusalem
Housing Minister Yoav Galant, a former major general in the IDF, called to expel the family of suspected Jerusalem car-ramming terrorist Fadi al-Qunbar to Syria.
Qunbar drove a truck into a group of soldiers on Jerusalem’s southern Haas Promenade Sunday, killing four and wounding at least 15. Soldiers and a civilian shot and killed him during the attack.
Speaking Sunday ahead of an emergency meeting of the security cabinet, the former chief of the IDF’s Central Command told Army Radio that Israel must deal harshly with the terrorist and his family. “The price must be demolishing homes, expelling families — even if they are Israeli citizens,” he said, “and revoking citizenship for anyone who is connected to this incident.”
Galant, of the Kulanu party, noted that Attorney General Avichai Mandelblit has ruled such expulsions illegal, and called for new legislation to change that.
“The law needs to help the state to survive,” he said. “It is our duty to create the conditions in which someone who fights against the State of Israel, while receiving state benefits will not be here. Not him, not his family. And don’t expel them to Gaza, but to Syria.”
Galant added that security forces had prevented dozens of terror attacks in the past few months.
MK Avi Dichter, a former head of the Shin Bet, said Sunday that the attack would not affect Israelis’ commitment to remain in Jerusalem.
Dichter, who chairs the Knesset’s powerful Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, connected the attack to international pressure on Israel.
“Only a few days ago, I stood in that same place [as the attack] together with members of the European Parliament’s foreign affairs committee. I explained to them the absurdity of returning to the 1967 borders,” he said. “I stressed to them, as they were looking at the view of Jerusalem, the same view that the soldiers were looking at moments before the attack, that in this city more Jews live outside the 1967 borders than in the west of the city.”
Dichter vowed that the attack will not prevent the expansion of Israeli Jerusalem.
“We will console the families, we will hold the hands of the wounded, and we will continue to build and be built in Jerusalem,” he said.
A group of soldiers were getting off a bus at the promenade, a popular tourist spot in southern Jerusalem, when Qunbar, a married father of two girls and two boys, drove a large flatbed truck into them.
The four soldiers killed — three women and one man — were in their 20s, the Magen David Adom rescue service said. Sixteen more people were injured, two of them very seriously.
According to police, the driver accelerated as he struck the group.
After the driver hit the soldiers with his truck, he put the vehicle into reverse and began to run over them a second time.
The terrorist was shot by soldiers and a civilian tour guide, police said. He died of his wounds.
