‘The man who cleaned our house for 2.5 years was the terrorist’

Har Adar resident Michal Avidor says Nimer Jamal, who shot dead 3 Israelis at Har Adar, seemed ‘completely normal’ and ‘good-natured’

By ToI Staff 26 September 2017, 11:23 am

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Local residents at the Har Adar settlement, outside Jerusalem, on September 26, 2017, pictured after a Palestinian terrorist killed two security officers and a border policeman there, and seriously injuring another man. (Hadas Parush/FLASH90)

The Palestinian father of four who killed three Israelis at Har Adar on Tuesday morning was a “completely normal” and “good-natured” man who worked as a cleaner for a group of families at the settlement, one of the residents who employed him said soon after the shooting.

Interviewed on Israel Radio, Michal Avidor said she was “on my way to the school to tell my children that the man who’s been cleaning our house for the past two and a half years was the terrorist.” The gunman was identified as Nimer Jamal, 37, from the adjacent village of Bayt Surik.

Nimr Mahmoud Ahmed Jamal, who carried out a terror attack at the Har Adar settlement on on September 26, 2017 (Facebook)

Avidor said she was astounded when she realized who the terrorist was. “I started to figure it out when they said he was a father of four from the village.”

“This was a man who we talked with,” she said, “whom my children gave drinks and food.”

She said she felt completely shocked by the incident, and that the first thing she wanted to do when she got home from telling her children was to completely clean her house.