Two terrorist stabbing attacks on Monday claimed the life of a young Israeli woman and left three others wounded, one critically, during a day of unrest across the Holy Land.
The first stabbing took place at a train station in central Tel Aviv, where an 18-year-old Palestinian youth attacked a young Israeli soldier. The soldier was stabbed repeatedly in the leg while the assailant tried to seize his automatic rifle. A passerby who tried to intervene was lightly wounded.
The injured soldier was found without a pulse by first responders, and underwent emergency surgery. He is currently in stable-but-critical condition.
The second attack occurred a very short time later at a bus stop near the Judean cluster of Jewish communities known as the Etzion Bloc. There, a Palestinian man attempted to carry out yet another vehicular terror attack by ramming three people waiting at the bus stop. When that failed, he leapt from the car and began stabbing his intended victims.
A 25-year-old Israeli woman was killed after being stabbed in the neck, and two other people were wounded, one seriously, before a nearby security guard shot and subdued the attacker.
Both terrorists were arrested. The first was identified as a follower of Hamas, while the second is a known member of Islamic Jihad.
In other violence, Palestinian Arabs stoned public buses and Jerusalem’s light rail, causing damage, but no injuries.
A day earlier, an Israeli man narrowly escaped being lynched when his car was surrounded at the entrance to the Arab town of Tayibe. A local man saved the frightened Jewish victim by pulling him away from the scene just before his car was torched.
The latest escalation of violence is being pinned on last Friday’s killing by police of a crazed knife-wielding Arab man near Nazareth. Kheir Hamdan was among thousands who were violently demonstrating against Israel when police showed up in the village of Kfar Kanna. Hamdan rushed the police van and began hitting the windows with his knife before being shot.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu rejected such justification for this new wave of violence, and vowed that those behind it would fail in their effort to “kick us (the Jews) out of here.”
At a meeting of his Likud faction on Monday, Netanyahu said that “all those who are shouting against Israel and demonstrating against it — you are welcome to move to the Palestinian Authority or to Gaza, Israel won’t stand in the way.”
In fact, Netanyahu hinted that his government was considering proposals to strip the most violent and virulent anti-Israel rioters of their Israeli citizenship.
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