Troops shut printer for posters lauding Jerusalem terrorist
Forces confiscate equipment in a-Ram amid crackdown on support for gunman who killed 2 in October 9 shooting attack
Stuart Winer is a breaking news editor at The Times of Israel.
A Jerusalem-area print shop was raided by Israel troops early Thursday for manufacturing posters in support of a terrorist who carried out a deadly shooting attack in the capital nearly two weeks ago, the army said.
Soldiers broke open the press in the central West Bank town of a-Ram and seized printing equipment as well as “posters and inciting material,” the IDF said in a statement.
Among the material was posters praising Mesbah Abu Sabih, a well-known Hamas activist who killed a pedestrian and a policeman during a shooting spree in Jerusalem on October 9, before being killed in a shootout with cops.
Abu Sabih, a 39-year-old resident of Silwan in East Jerusalem, killed police First Sergeant Yosef Kirma, 29, and a former Knesset worker Levana Malihi, 60, during the attack near Jerusalem’s Ammunition Hill. Six other people were injured in the incident.
The print shop had produced posters praising Sabih, some of which were posted at his parents’ home and at other “centers of incitement in the Binyamin region” the IDF noted, using the biblical name for an area in the central West Bank.
Under order of the IDF Central Command the press was shut down.
Israel has arrested several people since the attack for praising Abu Sabih, including people who handed out sweets after the attack, shut their shops in protest of his killing and an East Jerusalem soccer coach whose team posed with a poster of Abu Sabih.
Sabih’s daughter, Eiman Abu, 17, was arrested the day after the attack when she posted a video on her Facebook profile in which she said “we deem my father as martyr” and “we hope he will plead for us before God on judgment day. … I am proud of what my father did.”
“We’re very happy and proud of our father,” she said. “My father is a great man. Our relationship, as father and daughter, was excellent.”
The teenager was freed six days later on the condition that she stay out of Jerusalem for two months, not grant any media interviews or post on social media for an unspecified amount of time, and pay a fine of NIS 2,500 ($654), the Ynet news site reported at the time.
Also overnight Wednesday the IDF together with Border Police arrested five suspects in West Bank, two of them on suspicion of involvement in low-level “terror” activity.
All of the suspects were detained for questioning.
