Palestinian teen stabber in 2015 terror attack jailed for 16 years
Female university student had posted on Facebook of her desire to die for Palestinian cause before committing attack in Jerusalem’s Old City
A Palestinian teenager who stabbed an Israeli man in a terror attack in Jerusalem a year ago was sentenced Sunday to 16 years in prison.
Shorouq Dwayyat was sentenced by the Jerusalem District Court, the Palestinian Ma’an news agency reported. She was found guilty in September of stabbing one man in Jerusalem’s Old City and attempting to stab another during the October 7, 2015 terror attack. The court also ordered her to pay a fine of NIS 80,000 ($20,000), according to the report.
Dwayyat, who was 18 at the time of the attack, wrote on Facebook of her desire to die as a “martyr.” She left her home in the East Jerusalem Tsur Baher neighborhood with a kitchen knife, telling her mother that she wished to pray at the al-Aqsa Mosque on the Temple Mount before going to her university classes at Bethlehem University.
Just inside the entrance to the Old City, she spotted two Jewish men, and stabbed one of them — Daniel Rosenfeld — in the shoulder and head, according to Israeli media reports. She then tried to stab the second, Zvi Greenspan, but was shot by Rosenfeld and evacuated in critical condition to Jerusalem’s Hadassah Hospital Ein Kerem. Rosenfeld was moderately wounded in the attack.
Dwayyat previously wrote several posts on Facebook of her desire to die as a “martyr” for the Palestinian cause. In a Facebook post immediately before she carried out the attack, Dwayyat told her mother not to mourn for her. She wrote:
“Mother: Where are you going?
Mother, I am going to become a ‘shahid’ [martyr]
Mother, I want to ask a request of you
Don’t cry about me, when I become a shahid
#Our greatest desire is to become shadids for Allah”
In an interview with Channel 2 last year, Dwayyat’s mother claimed her daughter stabbed the Israeli in self-defense after he attempted to pull off her head covering. She said Shorouq had told her she was going to pray at the al-Aqsa Mosque before going to Bethlehem for classes. She was apparently unaware of her daughter’s Facebook posts.
The stabbing occurred at the peak of a wave of Palestinian terrorist attacks. Attacks began increasing in August 2015, when 171 attacks were documented, and rose sharply in September and October, with 223 and 620 attacks recorded in those months, respectively.
The year of Palestinian terrorism and violence saw 36 Israelis, two Americans and an Eritrean national killed in stabbing, car-ramming and shooting attacks. According to AFP figures, some 238 Palestinians, a Jordanian and a Sudanese migrant have also been killed, most of them in the course of carrying out attacks, Israel says, and many of the others in clashes with troops in the West Bank and at the Gaza border, as well as in Israeli airstrikes in the Strip.
