Lions' Gate stabbing | |
---|---|
Part of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict (2015) | |
Location | Jerusalem |
Coordinates | 31°46′51″N35°14′13″E / 31.78083°N 35.23694°E |
Date | 3 October 2015 |
Attack type | Stabbing |
Deaths | 2 (+1 attacker) |
Injured | 2 |
Assailant | Muhanad Shafeq Halabi |
On 3 October 2015, a Palestinian resident of al-Bireh attacked the Benita family near the Lions' Gate in Jerusalem, as they were on their way to the Western Wall to pray. The attacker murdered Aaron Benita, the father of the family, and injured the mother Adele and their 2-year-old son Matan. Nehemia Lavi, a resident who heard screams and came to help was also murdered and his gun taken by the assailant. The attacker, 19 year old Muhanad Shafeq Halabi was shot and killed by police as he was firing on pedestrians.
Adele described Arab residents standing by and laughing as she was attacked, and telling her to "drop dead" when she pleaded for help for her son. [1]
This attack and another stabbing attack, both of which took place during a religious festival that draws many Jews to the holy places in Jerusalem, resulted in Israeli authorities temporarily barring Arab residents of East Jerusalem from entering the walled Old City.
The attack came during the 2015–2016 wave of violence in Israeli-Palestinian conflict regarded by The Guardian as having begun in mid-September when a number of Palestinians "repeatedly barricaded themselves inside the al-Aqsa mosque and hurled stones, firebombs and fireworks at the police." [2] This series of attacks against Israeli Jews is notable for consisting of what are being called "grassroots" attacks, often involving the throwing of Molotov cocktails and rocks, lone wolf terrorism, stabbings and vehicular assault as a terrorist tactic. This is taking place during a period when terror attacks sponsored by organizations have declined. [3] [4] [5] This period has also seen the increasing prevalence of Jewish "price tag" operations, such as the arson attack that murdered three members of the Dawabsheh family in the West Bank village of Duma about two months ago. [4]
Opinions about underlying causes of the stabbings vary. The Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs attributes the stabbings to "incitement" by both radical Islamists and Palestinian government leaders, and, in particular, untruths being circulated about Israeli actions and false assertions that Israel intends to change the Status quo on the Temple Mount. [6] According to The Guardian, many analysts regard the issue of access to what is known to Muslims as al-Haram al-Sharif, or the Noble Sanctuary, and to Jews as the Temple Mount, as key to the recent increase in tension in Jerusalem. A campaign by some fundamentalist Jews and their supporters, with the backing of some members of the Israeli cabinet, demanding greater rights for Jewish worship at the site has raised the suspicion, despite repeated Israeli denials, that Israel intends to change the 'precarious status quo' for the site. [7] [8] Writing in The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg points to "Muslim supersessionism", the refusal of many Muslims to acknowledge that the Temple Mount is also holy to other faiths, and a parallel unwillingness to recognize that "Jews are a people who are indigenous to the land" of Israel. [9]
Aaron and Adele Benita and their two small children in strollers, were on their way to the Western Wall to pray, [10] when 19 year old Muhanad Shafeq Halabi from Al-Bireh started attacking and stabbing them, killing Aaron, critically wounding Adele and wounding 2 year old Matan, then stabbed Rabbi Nehemia Lavie who, hearing them scream for help, ran out of his house and tried to help them. During the assault, the attacker took a pistol from Lavie, and fired at pedestrians, until he was shot and killed by a police officer who had rushed to the scene. [11] [12] [13] [14] [15]
Adele Benita described the horror of being stabbed, trying to help her husband, and screaming for help while, "There were lots of Arabs around looking ... laughing and smiling..." Benita told the New York Times that she, “Screamed, I begged for aid,” but, “They stood chatting and laughing — they spat at me.” [16] As she ran past them to find help, Arab onlookers "spat at me and slapped me in the face. While the knife was still stuck in me they slapped me and laughed at me." [17] [18] As she pleaded for help, one of the Arab bystanders told her to, "drop dead." [1] [19]
The dead were Aharon Benita, 21, and Nehemia Lavie, 41, who attempted to come to the couple's rescue.
Lavie was a rabbi and military reserve officer who had lived for 23 years in the street where he was stabbed to death. [21] The Lavies are one of about 70 Jewish families who live outside the Jewish Quarter of the Old City, mostly in the Muslim Quarter, which used to be a mixed neighborhood until the 1929 Palestine riots. [22]
Adele Banita and her small son were injured, Adele wounded seriously with stab wounds. Visiting Mrs. Benita in hospital along with Minister of Public Security Gilad Erdan, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said: "Let's make this clear,"... "just as we’ve smashed previous waves of terrorism, we will also smash this wave of terrorism." [23]
The attacker was Muhannad Halabi, 19. [5] He was a resident of East Jerusalem and a law student at Al Quds University. [24] He is said to have been distraught over the death of a fellow student, Dia Talahma, 21, who died when a grenade he was throwing at Israeli troops exploded too soon. [25] [26] Halabi has been called “the lion,” and “the thunder” that unleashed the new uprising, on some Facebook pages. [25]
Before attacking, he wrote on his Facebook page, "What's happening to our holy places? What's happening to our mothers and sisters in the Al-Aqsa mosque? We are not the people who accept humiliation. Our people will revolt." [5] And, "the third intifada has begun". [24]
This widely publicized attack is understood to have "quickly sparked a spate of similar assaults." [27]
On 4 October a male Palestinian teenager attacked 15-year-old Israeli Moshe Malka with a knife, [28] wounding him before being shot and killed by police. The attacker was identified by relatives as Fadi Alloun (alt.: Alon), 19. Before attacking, he posted on his Facebook page: "Either martyrdom or victory." [29] [18] Palestinians cast doubts on the Israeli report that Alon tried to stab a Jew. Based on a video they claimed that a group of Jews attacked him and called on the police to shoot him without reason. [30] According to the New York Times, the video shows Alon fleeing after he had, "stabbed and wounded," the 15-year-old Jewish boy, with Israeli civilians chasing him and yelling, “Shoot him!” [31] Release of Alon's body for burial was delayed by Israel authorities after mourners called him a "martyr," and declared that his funeral would be, "a national celebration." [32] Israel agreed to release the body for burial by a strictly limited number of mourners. [33]
On 6 October, an 18-year-old woman attacked an Israeli man with a knife near the Lions' Gate. The victim was able to draw his gun and shoot his attacker. Both were hospitalized; both were expected to live. [34] [35] The attacker was Shurooq Dweiyat, 18, from the Palestinian neighborhood of Sur Baher, [36] a student at Bethlehem University who began collecting donations for the families of "“martyrs" the week before she stabbed an Israeli. [25] On the morning of the attack, she told friends that she was cutting class to pray at the Al Aqsa mosque. [25] A video circulating widely among Palestinians shows Dweiyat being pounced on after the stabbing by police who found two knives in her possession; it does not show her stabbing the policeman. [25] Ma'an news agency reported that witnesses saw an Israeli man opened fire at the teenager in the al-Wad Street in the Old City, a few meters away from the Council Gate leading to Al-Aqsa Mosque. They said she was assaulted by the Israeli man and subsequently was not found to have any sharp objects on her person. [37]
On 12 October an Arab man approaching the Gate from the cemeteries outside the walls was asked to remove his hands from his pockets by police. He pulled out a knife and attacked the police officer, fellow officers quickly shot the assailant. The officer who was attacked was saved from harm by his bulletproof vest. [27] [38]
In response to the 3 October Lions' Gate stabbing, as well as the 4 October stabbing of a 15-year-old Israeli, the Israeli government temporarily barred Palestinians from entering the walled Old City of Jerusalem for 2 days beginning 4 October. [43] The ban was intended to protect visitors to the city during the Jewish holiday Sukkot. [29] Palestinians who lived, studied or worked in the Old City were exempted form the ban. [29] The ban was lifted on 6 October. [44]
Israeli security "flooded" the streets of the Old City following the first stabbing attack, according to a report in Haaretz . [30] Dozens of protesters demonstrated against the restrictions near the Al-Aqsa mosque before being dispersed by Israeli forces, with several injured due to smoke inhalation. [30] Businesses in the Muslim Quarter and East Jerusalem schools declared a strike. [30]
On 8 October, after the broader ban was lifted, Jerusalem police announced that Muslim men under the age of 50 would be barred from entering the Temple Mount during Friday prayers, with no restrictions on Muslim women. [45] Prime Minister Netanyahu also announced a ban on both Arab and Jewish politicians entering the site in an effort to reduce tensions. [45]
The ongoing conflict between Palestinians and Jewish Israeli settlers in the West Bank city of Hebron is part of the wider Israeli–Palestinian conflict. Hebron has a Palestinian majority, consisting of an estimated 208,750 citizens (2015) and a small Jewish minority, variously numbered between 500 and 800. The H1 sector of Hebron, home to around 170,000 Palestinians, is governed by the Palestinian Authority. H2, which was inhabited by around 30,000 Palestinians, is under Israeli military control with an entire brigade in place to protect some 800 Jewish residents living in the old Jewish quarter. As of 2015, Israel has declared that a number of special areas of Old City of Hebron constitute a closed military zone. Palestinians shops have been forced to close; despite protests Palestinian women are reportedly frisked by men, and residents, who are subjected every day to repeated body searches, must register to obtain special permits to navigate through the 18 military checkpoints Israel has set up in the city center.
In 2009, clashes between Muslim Palestinians and Israeli police erupted on September 27, 2009, and continued to late October. Violence spread through East Jerusalem and parts of the West Bank, and included throwing of Molotov cocktails and stones at Israeli security forces and civilians. Israeli police responded with arrests of rioters and sporadic age-based restriction of access to the Temple Mount. Several dozen rioters, police and Israeli civilians have been injured.
On 24 December 2009, three Palestinian gunmen opened fire on a vehicle near Shavei Shomron in the West Bank, killing an Israeli settler. The Imad Mughniyeh Group, a little-known affiliate of the Al Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades, the armed wing of the Fatah party, claimed responsibility for the attack.
The 2011 Tel Aviv nightclub attack was a combined vehicular assault and stabbing attack which occurred on 29 August 2011 when a Palestinian attacker stole an Israeli taxi cab and rammed it into a police checkpoint guarding the popular nightclub, Haoman 17, in Tel Aviv which was filled with 2,000 Israeli teenagers. After crashing into the checkpoint, the attacker jumped out of the vehicle and began stabbing people. Four civilians, four police officers, and the assailant were injured in the attack. The assailant was living illegally in Israel at the time of the attack.
The 2013 Tapuah Junction stabbing occurred on 30 April, in which an armed Israeli settler, Evyatar Borovsky, was stabbed, disarmed and then, according to some witnesses, shot with his own weapon at a bus stop in the northern West Bank by a Palestinian resident of Tulkarem. The Israeli police described the attacker as a "Palestinian terrorist". The perpetrator was identified as Salam As'ad Zaghal, who had recently been released from 3.5 years in jail for planting explosives. The stabbing was praised by Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas's Fatah party, its military wing, and its Islamist offshoot the Palestinian Mujahideen movement, and by Zaghal's family. Jewish settlers in the West Bank waged a series of violent reprisal attacks against Palestinian targets in the West Bank, and an Israeli outpost was later named in the victim's honor.
The 2014 Jerusalem unrest, sometimes referred as the Silent Intifada is a term occasionally used to refer to an increase in violence focused on Jerusalem in 2014, especially from July of that year. Although the name "silent intifada," appears to have been coined in the summer of 2014, suggestions that there should be or already is an incipient intifada had circulated among activists, columnists, journalists and on social media since 2011. Commentators speculated about the varying utility to the Palestinian and Israeli left, right, and center of not only of naming, but of asserting or denying that there is or is about to be a new intifada.
The 2014 Alon Shvut stabbing attack occurred on 10 November 2014, when Palestinian Maher al-Hashlamun first attempted to run his vehicle into a crowd waiting at the bus/hitch-hiking station at the entrance to the Israeli settlement of Alon Shvut, in the Gush Etzion section of the occupied West Bank, then, when the car was stopped by a bollard, got out and attacked with a knife, killing a young woman and wounding two others. The attack occurred four hours after the killing of Sergeant Almog Shiloni in Tel Aviv and took place at the same bus/hitch-hiking stop where three Israeli teenagers were kidnapped and murdered in June 2014.
Sergeant Almog Shiloni of the Israel Defense Forces was killed on 10 November 2014 after he was stabbed multiple times at Tel Aviv HaHagana Railway Station. He died in hospital from his wounds. Shiloni was off-duty, but in uniform and armed at the time.
List of violent events related to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict occurring in the second half of 2015.
Between the autumn of 2015 and the first half of 2016, there was an uptick in violence in the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. The period was variously nicknamed the "Intifada of the Individuals", "Knife Intifada", or "Jerusalem Intifada", among other monikers, due to the many stabbings in Jerusalem. In total, 38 Israelis and 235 Palestinians were killed in the violence, while 558 Israelis and thousands of Palestinians were injured.
This is a Timeline of events related to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict during 2016.
On 30 June 2016, a 17-year-old Palestinian male broke into a home in the Israeli settlement of Kiryat Arba and stabbed to death Hallel Yaffa Ariel a thirteen year old Israeli-American citizen in her bedroom. The attacker was then fatally shot by security guards. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu blamed "incitement-driven terrorists" while the U.S. State Department condemned the "outrageous terrorist attack".
On 9 October 2016 in Jerusalem, Musbah Abu Sbaih, a Hamas militant shot 8 people from a car near the Ammunition Hill light rail stop, killing two and wounding six. The police gave chase, Shaih was shot and killed while shooting at pursuing police.
On 14 July 2017, three Arab-Israeli men left the Temple Mount, and opened fire on Israeli border police officers stationed near the Gate of the Tribes which is close to the Lions' Gate. Two Israeli border police officers were killed and two more were injured in the attack. All three attackers were shot and killed by Israeli police after fleeing back into the complex.
The Halamish attack, or the Halamish massacre was a terrorist attack on a Jewish family in the West Bank Israeli settlement of Halamish, that took place on 21 July 2017, in which three Israelis were stabbed to death and one severely wounded. The victims of the attack were Yosef Salomon, his daughter Chaya and son Elad, the three who were murdered in the attack, and Tova Salomon, Yosef's wife, who was injured but survived.
The 2017 Temple Mount crisis was a period of violent tensions related to the Temple Mount, which began on 14 July 2017, after a shooting incident in the complex in which Palestinian gunmen killed two Israeli police officers. Following the attack, Israeli authorities installed metal detectors at the entrance to the Mount in a step that caused large Palestinian protests and was severely criticized by Palestinian leaders, the Arab League, and other Muslim leaders, on the basis that it constituted a change in the "status quo" of the Temple Mount entry restrictions.
The following is a list of events during the Israeli–Palestinian conflict in 2022.
On 15 April 2022, clashes erupted between Palestinians and Israeli Security Forces on the Al-Aqsa compound in the Old City of Jerusalem. According to the United Nations Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process, the clashes began when Palestinians threw stones, firecrackers, and other heavy objects at Israeli police officers. The policemen used tear gas shells, stun grenades and police batons against the Palestinians. Some Palestinians afterwards barricaded themselves inside the Al-Aqsa Mosque and proceeded to throw stones at the officers. In response, police raided the mosque, arresting those who had barricaded themselves inside. In addition, some damage was done to the mosque's structure.
Events in the year 2022 in the Palestinian territories.
The 1997–99 Jerusalem stabbings were a series of murders and attempted murders in Jerusalem which primarily took place in and around the Jerusalem neighborhood of Mea Shearim.