Recounting deaths on a day of old news

Old news is the order of the day Tuesday as the Hebrew papers play catchup after what was effectively an extra long weekend, thanks to the Simhat Torah holiday. But one thing remains on the minds of the Israeli media: the violent unrest rattling Jerusalem and the West Bank. Each paper recounts the deaths of a different pair of people in separate incidents from Thursday through Monday.

The IDF raid on a Nablus hospital to arrest suspected terrorists involved in the shooting of Eitam and Naama Henkin on Thursday night gets top billing in Yedioth Ahronoth, who give the play-by-play of the arrest and a recreation of the shooting. It reports that, with guns drawn, undercover Israeli police officers burst into the hospital, went up to the third floor and dragged the prime suspect out of a hospital bed.

One of the Palestinians had shot the other in the hand during the execution of the Henkins, inflicting a wound that required hospitalization for the wounded man and causing the group to flee the scene. That screw-up, Yedioth Ahronoth quotes a senior IDF officer saying, “led to the children staying alive.”

Israel arrested five Palestinians, all suspected of belonging to Hamas and taking part in the murder or its planning. The paper calls it “a significant accomplishment for the defense establishment, which succeeded within a day to reach the murderers of the Henkin couple.” (The paper makes no mention of the Israeli security forces not indicting anybody to date in the torching of the Dawabsha family home in the two months since the alleged Jewish terror attack.)

The suspects copped to the crime, the paper reports.

Israel Hayom‘s play-by-play is from the second murder of Israelis over the weekend, which took place in the streets of the Old City of Jerusalem. The paper leads off with Adele Banita’s recounting of the Palestinian terror attack in which her husband and another man were killed and she was seriously injured on Saturday. The paper highlights not just the brutality of the double murder, but also “the cruelty of the bystanders” who stood on the sidelines and offered no aid to the Banita family.

“The whole way, while I ran, I heard curses. They spat in my face, they slapped me, they laughed, shouted,” Adele Banita recalled from her hospital bed. “Just animals. The knife was still in my neck, inside my body. I felt it was organized. I turned to one Arab, I tried asking him for help. I said to him, ‘I will pay you a million shekel, come help me, take me with the kids.’ He started to laugh at me and said, ‘Die.'”

“Around us were groups of Arab youths, looking and watching the incident and not speaking out, just laughing and smiling,” she said.

The paper reports that Public Security Minister Gilad Erdan instructed police to launch an immediate criminal investigation into the shopkeepers for allegedly standing idly by while the murders were carried out. As expected, Israel Hayom features a photo of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Erdan at Banita’s bedside.

For Haaretz, the freshest news, of two Palestinians shot dead by the IDF and hundreds more injured in skirmishes across the West Bank over the weekend, makes the front page. Those deaths only make it to Page 6 in Yedioth Ahronoth and Page 9 in Israel Hayom, and both only in passing.

Haaretz also reports on the stabbing of an Israeli teen near the Old City early on Sunday morning, and the subsequent shooting of the suspected Palestinian assailant by police. The paper reports that the police contended that the 18-year-old man from the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Issawiya was shot after threatening officers and civilians, while the family claimed he was killed after trying to defend himself from right-wing Jewish extremists who marched through Jerusalem Saturday night.

And what say the pundits, who are again out in droves? Haaretz pans Netanyahu’s response to the surge in terrorist attacks, saying it is exactly the same as it was after last November’s attack on a Jerusalem synagogue: destruction of Palestinian terrorists’ homes, and a beefed up security presence in Jerusalem and the West Bank. The past year’s violent terrorist attacks, and last week’s in particular, “prove how useless and illogical Netanyahu’s policies are,” the paper says. The issue at hand isn’t terrorism, it argues, but the Temple Mount.

“Netanyahu must take steps like showing seriousness about maintaining the status quo on the Temple Mount, or like bringing in observers – Palestinian or international, in uniform or plainclothed – to the site,” it writes.

In Israel Hayom, Boaz Bismuth rails against the overt anti-Semitism of Arabs, saying that must be solved if there’s to be a lasting resolution to the conflict.

“The reaction of the Arab onlookers was nauseating. This is not how things should be in Israel’s reunited capital city,” he writes.

“The true story behind what is going on before our eyes is the radicalization of the Arabs in our neighborhood. The violence in Syria, Yemen, Libya and Iraq is now influencing the Palestinians. Terrorists continue to be role models for the Palestinians,” Bismuth argues.

While he acknowledges that not all Palestinians are bloodthirsty murderers, he contends that “things will only get better when the Arabs come to understand that Jews are not ‘settlers’ in their own land and are certainly not ‘criminal trespassers’ in Jerusalem, the city of David.”

As for this cycle of bloodshed, he channels Ecclesiastes, which was read in synagogues on Sukkot: “There’s nothing new under the sun.”