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Palestinian stabs two Israeli soldiers, shot dead in West Bank attack
Two Israeli soldiers were injured yesterday, one seriously, when a Palestinian man stabbed them in the West Bank, before being shot dead by one of his victims.
The attack occurred near the settlement of Ma’ale Levona on Route 60. The two soldiers belonged to a medical unit, which had apparently been deployed as reinforcement during the busy Passover holiday. At around 10am, 32-year-old Mohammed Jasser Karakra from nearby Sinjar walked past the ambulance manned by the two victims, before turning round and stabbing Sergeant Tomer Lan. Karakra then entered the ambulance and attacked the second, unnamed soldier, who received serious wounds. Lan had by this point recovered sufficiently to respond, telling Haaretz “I got up, operated my weapon, pointed it, shot and killed him.” The second soldier was evacuated to a Jerusalem hospital with head and neck wounds and received a blood transfusion.
Israeli security forces searched the area in the wake of the attack, but it appears that Karakra was acting alone and is not believed to have had an affiliation with a known terror group. IDF soldiers are believed to have searched Karakra’s home and questioned his father.
However, yesterday’s incident is the latest in a series of apparent ‘lone wolf’ knife attacks by Palestinians on Israelis during the past several months. Last week, an Israeli soldier was stabbed near the security barrier at Oranit, but overcame his attacker. In January, 12 commuters were injured in Tel Aviv when a Palestinian man boarded a bus and stabbed its passengers. In November, an Israeli woman was stabbed and killed in the Gush Etzion region of the West Bank on the same day that a Palestinian stabbed on off-duty soldier to death in Tel Aviv.
Meanwhile, Palestinian police reported yesterday that they had assumed responsibility for patrols in three Palestinian neighbourhoods near Jerusalem, implementing an agreement between Israel and the Palestinian Authority as part of the peace negotiations spearheaded last year by US Secretary of State John Kerry.