Wounded rabbi says terrorist called him ‘enemy of al-Aqsa’

Rabbi Yehudah Glick, who was seriously injured in a shooting attack three weeks ago, said Monday that the gunman had apologized before opening fire and called him the “enemy of al-Aqsa.”

Sitting on a chair in his hospital room in a meeting with Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi David Lau, the wounded Temple Mount activist recalled the incident as it unfolded in the 13 minutes from the moment he was shot until his arrival at Jerusalem’s Shaare Zedek hospital.

“He approached me, stood in front of me, and I of course innocently believed” that he sought to talk, Glick said. “He told me, ‘I’m very sorry, you are the enemy of al-Aqsa,’ then he shot, boom boom boom.”

Glick said that his friend, Shai Malka, the head of the Manhigut Yehudit, or Jewish Leadership, faction within the Likud party, ran up to him “and he told me: ‘Yehudah, we need you, come.’ So we ran.”

The injured rabbi said that someone yelled that there was a terror attack, and his wife hid in the car.

“It took 13 minutes from the moment of the attack until we reached Shaare Zedek,” he said.

The injured activist described the motive behind the shooting, saying jokingly that he wasn’t hospitalized for appendicitis or “shot because I was a redhead,” but rather because the terrorist “dared taunt the armies of Israel,” in a allusion to the biblical Goliath who fought David.

The chief rabbi told Glick that he awaited the day the two would visit the Temple Mount together. Lau, whose rabbinate maintains that according to Jewish law Jews should not visit the holy site, was likely speaking of a future anticipated change in status quo that would take effect during the messianic era.

Glick was shot four times by a Palestinian gunman outside the Menachem Begin Heritage Center in central Jerusalem on the night of October 29.

He was taken to the hospital in critical condition, but through the course of several surgeries has been gradually improving.

Last week, his father said that Glick was awake and communicating with those around him.

“He is alert now… He’s awake, writing. He wrote that he wants chocolate mousse,” Shimon Glick told Army Radio last Tuesday. “There is light at the end of the tunnel…The doctors are optimistic” that he’ll fully recover.

Later that day, Glick was able to breathe on his own, and telephoned Knesset Speaker Yuli Edelstein to thank him for all the support he has received, Edelstein reported.

The terrorist, Mu’taz Hijazi, was killed the next morning in the Jerusalem neighborhood of Abu Tor after allegedly opening fire on officers who came to arrest him.

Hijazi, who worked at the Begin Center, had been arrested in 2000 and served 11 years in prison. He had originally been sentenced to six years for membership in the Islamic Jihad terror group and for participation in violent rioting. Additional time was added to his sentence after he was tried for assaulting a prison guard.

Spencer Ho contributed to this report.