The landscape of Israel is so thick with memorials to fallen sons and daughters that you almost feel that if you stacked them all, you could build a staircase of marble, concrete, and metal far beyond the clouds. On Wednesday a new name was added to that list, when 19-year-old Border Police officer Hadar Cohen was killed in a terror attack at the Damascus Gate, just two months after she’d enlisted in the service. Another Israeli in uniform cut down …
Confusion seemed the order of the day in the minutes after a gunman had opened fire on a pub and a café on Dizengoff Friday afternoon, killing 2 and wounding 8 before vanishing without a trace. A rumor caught wind – from a reporter, maybe, or a random cop – that a suspect had been spotted a few blocks north on Nordau, and plainclothes cops with assault rifles started to give chase. It was then that something I’d never seen before happened …
Scenes from the Tel Aviv terror attack (this time) Read More »
It would be funnier if it wasn’t real life and the stakes weren’t so high: a vigilante who tried to lynch a terrorist is arrested by police and then set upon by a mob which now mistakes him for the attacker. That scene actually unfolded last Monday evening in Netanya, minutes after an attacker stabbed an elderly woman and was shot and subdued by police. The vigilante – who in trying to get to the terrorist scuffled with police – was …
The video that went viral in Israel on Monday left little room for debate. Three Special Patrol Unit police officers are standing outside Damascus Gate in Jerusalem, when one of them asks a young man for his ID and all hell breaks loose. The man, later named as Muhammad Ali, 19, from Shuafat, takes a knife and stabs the neck of one of the police officers and then jumps and stabs a second one, before he is taken down in a …
The first news about the stabbing spree on the Tel Aviv bus Wednesday morning came in like it always does – in a short message on WhatsApp, trailed by a barrage of follow up questions and replies, sending my phone into seizures. Just like that, one moment you’re feeding your infant daughter breakfast and the next you’re taking pictures of blood puddles and paramedics, an avalanche of information piling up around you. Somehow nobody was killed in Wednesday’s attack, but the …
It’s startling sometimes the difference an hour or two can make. Wednesday went from a quiet morning with my infant daughter and not much happening in Israel, to a gunfight on the Egypt border between smugglers and IDF troops, and then, later in the day, a deadly attack in Jerusalem in which a Palestinian man rammed his car into passengers at a light rail stop, killing a 3-month-old girl and wounding 8 others. From that point on a familiar scene played …
Yitzhak Algabry didn’t know his life was about to end when he walked into his backyard in Moshav Avihayil in the Sharon one night in October 2012 to grab some bread for a family dinner that was taking place inside the house. Instead, Algabry surprised three burglars from Tulkarm who were hiding in the apartment unit in the back yard. The men began to fight with him, with one bludgeoning him in the head before another stabbed him in the chest …