Tuesday, April 15, 2014

15-Apr-14: Seder night shooting attack: dead and wounded Israeli victims

Route 35 near Kiryat Arba last night: IDF soldiers search
for the shooter's trail [Image Source: Ynet]
In the final minutes before the onset of Passover on Monday evening, an Israeli family from Modi'in, traveling on Highway 35 by car to a family seder in the Jewish community of Kiryat Arba came under fire near the Arab village of Idhna (population 19,000). 

The driver, a man in his forties and a police officer (according to a report from Israel National News: "Terrorist Murders Man and Wounds Family in Hevron") was shot to death. 

His pregnant wife was struck by bullets as well and evacuated to Jerusalem's Shaarei Zedek Medical Center in moderate to critical condition. 

One of their children sitting in the back seat was also hit by bullets; we don't yet know of his condition.

[UPDATE: 11:00 pm Tuesday: The man murdered in yesterday's shooting is Police Chief Superintendent Baruch Mizrahi, described as a senior police intelligence and crime officer, and a father of five whose wife, also wounded, is pregnant. In this Hebrew news report, he is described as head of SigInt, or signals intelligence, in the Investigations and Intelligence arm of Israel Police. The indiscriminate shooters and their terrorist accomplices may come to rue their inadvertent choice of target. The funeral has been announced for 1:00 pm Wednesday in Jerusalem's Mt Herzl military cemetery.]

Times of Israel ["Israeli man killed, two injured in terror attack near Hebron"] reported shortly after the attack that the IDF’s initial investigation indicated the shooter had approached the road on foot, and opened fire with dozens of rounds from an automatic weapon, evidently an AK47 rifle, seeking to hit passing Israeli vehicles. Quoting an eye-witness, the report says two cars were struck in the hail of fire but managed to escape the scene, after which the family from Modi’in became the principal victims of the terrorism.

To this hour. relatively little media attention (for example, at the BBC) has been given outside Israel to the killing - coming as it has on the twelfth anniversary of the Park Hotel Seder Night massacre in Netanya - or its impact on terrorism-addicted Palestinian Arab society. Two American newspapers are notable exceptions.

The Los Angeles Times wrote that two of the three major terrorist forces in the Palestinian Arab sphere, Hamas and Islamic Jihad, both "praised the attack but did not take responsibility for it".

And the NY Daily News ["Hamas praises shooting that killed Israeli man, wounded his wife and son"] quotes Ismail Haniyeh, the "prime minister" of the Gaza Strip saying the murder “brought back life to the path of resistance” against Israel. He warned Israelis to expect more of the same from Palestinian Arabs, and particularly in "the West Bank [which] will be the future point of our struggle with the enemy.] We believe him.

Route 35 this morning (Tuesday) [Image Source]
As for the third of the major terrorist groups, Fatah, and its nominal head, Mahmoud Abbas (marking the tenth year of his four-year term as 'democratically' elected president of the PA), there are reports of anger among Israeli sources at their failure to condemn the assault.

We strongly prefer to ignore that genre of strictly-for-the-Western-media play-acting. Mealy-mouthed, plainly insincere expressions of Arab protest have a long and nasty history. 

One of Yasser Arafat's bodyguards, Muhammad Al-Daya, shed a little light on the rules of that pathetic condemnation-of-terror charade just a fortnight ago in this interview with the BBC.

As with the thugs from Hamas and Islamic Jihad when they speak in Arabic on matters pertaining to terror, the terrorists ought to be believed.

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