BREAKING: A pair of Arab women armed with scissors attacked passers-by at Jerusalem’s famed Mahane Yehuda market place. Four were wounded before police shot and killed one of the women and the second moderately injured.
The seemingly spontaneous “popular violence” aimed at Israelis continued on Sunday when a 21-year old woman was mortally stabbed in the head at a hitchhiking post at a major junction in the area of Gush Etzion, a bloc of Jewish communities a few miles south of Jerusalem located on land Israel conquered in the 1967 war. Hadar Buchris, 21, was pronounced dead at Jerusalem’s Shaare Zedek Medical Center after doctors were unable to save her. A soldier also standing at the hitchhiking stand shot and killed her assailant. The spot where the incident occurred has been the scene of other attacks on civilians and soldiers. It occurred only hours after two other spontaneous attacks took place: a 16-year old Palestinian girl was shot to death while attempting to stab Israelis and a Palestinian taxi driver died after being shot by soldiers when, after failing to run over pedestrians with his cab he took out a knife and tried to stab bystanders. During the past two months, a score of Israelis have died in the series of makeshift attacks by Palestinians, most of whom were killed by soldiers or armed bystanders at the scenes of the attacks. On Sunday, Prime Minister Netanyahu acknowledged the difficulty in “prevent[ing] the arrival of such knife-wielding or other terrorists to this or that place.” On Monday, Israel’s military banned entry by Palestinians into the Gush Etzion bloc. The ban against entering the various communities affects more than 2,000 Palestinians who work in the Etzion communities. Early Monday morning a rocket that was fired from the Gaza Strip landed in southern Israel in an open area causing no injuries or damage. Israeli policy has been to retaliate by sending air strikes at Hamas targets.