Palestinian arrested after reaching for policeman’s gun

Police say unnamed man grabbed for weapon while being given a ticket during a traffic stop at Gush Etzion Junction in the West Bank

Illustrative: A soldier stands at a bus station at Gush Etzion Junction on April 28, 2020. (Gershon Elinson/Flash90)
Illustrative: A soldier stands at a bus station at Gush Etzion Junction on April 28, 2020. (Gershon Elinson/Flash90)

An unidentified Palestinian man was arrested on Sunday evening after trying to grab a policeman’s gun at a busy West Bank intersection, the Israel Police announced.

“A Palestinian suspect who tried to snatch a weapon from a police officer was arrested at the Gush Etzion Junction during the registration of a traffic report,” the police tweeted.

“Nobody was injured during the incident.”

The junction, in the Gush Etzion settlement bloc near Jerusalem, has been the site of numerous attacks, both attempted and successful, against Israeli citizens over the years.

In January, the Israel Defense Forces said that soldiers thwarted an attempted stabbing attack there when a soldier identified an assailant running toward him with a knife and shot the attacker in the leg in order to neutralize him.

In November 2019, three Israeli soldiers were injured when a Palestinian man rammed his car into them down the road from the junction and that August, cousins Nasir and Qasseem al-Asafra kidnapped 18-year-old yeshiva student Dvir Sorek after he alighted from a bus at the site.

18-year-old Ezra Schwartz from Massachusetts, killed during a terrorist attack at the Gush Etzion Junction, November 19, 2015. (Courtesy)

In 2018, Ari Fuld, a 45-year-old American-Israeli father of four from the Efrat settlement, was stabbed to death at the site. Three years earlier, in 2015, 18-year old American yeshiva student Ezra Schwartz was shot and killed alongside Israeli Yaakov Don, 51, and Palestinian Shadi Arafa, 24 when Mohammed Abdel Basset al-Kharoub opened fire on a line of traffic with an Uzi submachine gun from inside a vehicle.

In 2014, teenagers Eyal Yifrach, 19, Naftali Fraenkel, 16, and Gil-ad Shaar, 16, were kidnapped from a hitchhiking stop at the junction and subsequently murdered, leading to the IDF’s 2014 Gaza incursion Operation Protective Edge.

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