Saturday, October 01, 2016

01-Oct-16: At Qalandiya Crossing on Jerusalem's northern edge, a thwarted stabbing attack leaves the assailant dead

With the end of the Sabbath, we're starting to catch up on the news of the past 28 hours. Not so surprisingly, one of the key reports concerns a Palestinian Arab man with a knife in his hand and mayhem on his mind.

This is how Times of Israel reports it:
An Israeli soldier was moderately wounded in a stabbing attack in the West Bank’s Qalandiya area north of Jerusalem on Friday, a police spokeswoman said. She said the Palestinian attacker was shot dead by surrounding forces. The 24-year-old IDF soldier was stabbed by a 28-year-old assailant who approached the Israeli checkpoint at Qalandiya on foot, officials said. The attacker was shot by both a soldier from the Military Police and a civilian security guard, and was killed. The soldier suffered stab wounds to his upper body. He was treated at the scene by paramedics who then took him to Hadassah Ein Kerem Hospital in Jerusalem. The attacker was a Jerusalem native, according to AFP. Some 200 Palestinians were rioting at the Qalandia checkpoint an hour after the stabbing. Police said security forces at the checkpoint were using riot-dispersal means. The Qalandiya checkpoint is the main crossing into the West Bank city of Ramallah.
Israel National News reports that the IDF serviceman is in fact a 20-year-old. His injuries were said to be moderate-to-serious when initially treated by an IDF medical team and Magen David Adom paramedics. He was quickly evacuated to the Hadassah Ein Kerem hospital in Jerusalem. A later report, also from Israel National News, this evening (Saturday) says he is now in moderate and stable condition and fully conscious.

Ma'an News Agency, the self-described independent Palestinian Arab news source, uncharacteristically fails to include the word "alleged" from its headline ["Palestinian shot dead after stabbing soldier at Qalandiya checkpoint"]. It says the attacker is a
28-year-old Palestinian was from the nearby village of Kafr Aqab in the Jerusalem district of the occupied West Bank. He was later identified on Palestinian media sites as Naseem Abu Meizar.
The young dead man from Kafr Aqab is already being turned into a "martyr" as the poster in tonight's Tweet [here] shows. And other parts of the Palestinian Arab media [here, for instance] haven't given up on the use of the word "alleged" in describing the last moments of the knifer's life.

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