Seven wounded, one terrorist killed in 3 West Bank attacks

Betar Illit sends Palestinian workers home after stabbing; Sirens blare in Sha’ar Hanegev after rocket fired from Gaza.

By TOVAH LAZAROFF, YAAKOV LAPPIN, BEN HARTMAN
Terror attack at Sha'ar Binyamin industrial park Nov 6, 2015 (photo credit: KBUZTAT MEDABRIM TAKSHORET)
Terror attack at Sha'ar Binyamin industrial park Nov 6, 2015
(photo credit: KBUZTAT MEDABRIM TAKSHORET)
Palestinian terrorists wounded seven Israelis in three attacks in separate locations in the West Bank on Sunday.
In addition, a rocket was fired from the Gaza Strip on Sunday evening, exploding in an open area near the border inside Israel and triggering warning sirens in the Sha’ar Hanegev Regional Council area, the IDF said. No casualties were reported.
In the first attack of the day, five Israelis were wounded in a vehicular assault at the Tapuah junction in the Samaria region of the West Bank around 9:30 a.m.
Border police at the scene shot and killed the Palestinian driver.
“A short while ago, a terrorist arrived at a hitch-hiking post next to a roadblock at Tapuah [junction], accelerated his vehicle and hit a number of civilians who were standing there,” Border Police said.
A video of the attack showed how a car, which almost appeared to come out of nowhere, rammed into a group of people who were waiting at the bus stop.
Magen David Adom said two men in their early 20s were moderately to seriously wounded.
A third man, 23, was moderately wounded. Two women, one of them pregnant, were lightly wounded.
The wounded – from Petah Tikva, Nof Ayalon and Talmon and Yitzhar of the West Bank – were taken to Rabin Medical Center’s Beilinson Campus in Petah Tikva.
A volunteer for United Hatzalah who was passing by the junction, Yaakov Selah, said he pulled his car over when he saw security forces racing to the scene of the attack, so he could help the wounded.
MDA paramedics Gil Bismuth and Avigail Mamliya said that when they arrived they found “the victims lying on the ground and fully conscious, but suffering from wounds to their extremities. The attacker’s car, with the [dead] terrorist inside, was still nearby.”
From the hospital, Malka Wasserman, 27, who is pregnant, recalled the moment the car plowed her down.
“It all happened very quickly.
I fell, and two other people fell.
Then the shooting started. I did not understand what was happening.
I tried to get up again, but fell. I was able to look up and then I saw that it was the police who were shooting until they neutralized him.
“I had been on my way to work in Elon Moreh. It was a normal day, in every way, that began so nicely and I felt secure going to work,” Wasserman said. She added that the attack obviously “put an end to that feeling of calm.”
After the attack, angry settlers briefly blocked the road by the nearby village of Huwara to protest the attack.
Samaria Region Council head Yossi Dagan said, “the terrorists are trying to push us out of the land by force.”
He reissued his call for the prime minister to respond to such attacks with announcements of new settlement construction.
More Jewish building is what will prevent future terrorist attacks, Dagan asserted.
In the second incident, a civilian security guard shot a female Palestinian assailant who stabbed and lightly wounded him as he stood at his post, just outside the Betar Illit settlement, a short distance from Jerusalem.
The incident was caught on the municipality’s security cameras.
An emergency dispatcher saw a Palestinian woman on one of the cameras who she believed looked suspicious.
The woman, 22-year-old Halva Aliyan, was dressed from head to toe in traditional black garb, with only her face showing.
She carried a purse and walked toward the gate of the city, which has a population of 47,000.
The dispatcher alerted the security guard who then stopped her and asked to see her identification card, which showed that she was born in the nearby Palestinian city of Bethlehem.
As the guard focused on checking her card, Aliyan slowly reached into her purse and pulled out a knife. She then lunged at the guard and tried to stab him.
The security guard was evacuated to Shaare Zedek Medical Center in Jerusalem in fair condition and Aliyan was taken to Hadassah-University Medical Center in Jerusalem’s Ein Kerem, where she was listed in serious condition.
The emergency dispatcher said he believed Aliyan had planned to head to a bus stop to attack people standing there with her knife.
After he had been treated in the hospital the security guard said that he too had believed Aliyan looked suspicious, because she seemed stressed and kept looking right and left as she headed to his post.
“When she came closer she gave me a Palestinian identity card. When I looked at it, there weren’t any permits.
She spoke with me only in Arabic.
I told her, ‘You don’t have the authorization to come in.
“As I was speaking with her, she put her hand in her bag. I asked her, ‘why are you doing that, what do you have there.’ As I was asking these questions she took out a knife and stabbed me, a bit, it was more like a scratch. I was able to distance myself, take out my gun, shoot and neutralize her,” the guard said.
“Thank God it ended this way, with just a scratch,” the guard said.
He added that it was his 33rd birthday.
“I feel like I was given my life today as a gift.”
After the attack, the municipality decided to ask the Palestinian workers in the city to head home for the day.
In the third incident on Sunday, a 48-year-old man was badly wounded in a stabbing attack outside the Palestinian village of Nabi Ilyas.
The Defense Ministry said the Emmanuel resident drove himself to a checkpoint and told security forces, “I’ve been stabbed, I’ve been stabbed,” and then lost consciousness.
He was treated by IDF personnel at the scene and then evacuated to Meir Medical Center in Kfar Saba while hooked up to a respirator.
An initial investigation has determined that the man stopped at a roadside store outside the Palestinian village when he was stabbed in the stomach.
The assailants fled the scene, and have not been apprehended. Security forces have launched searches in the area.
Early Sunday morning, Border Police officers arrested a Palestinian man caught trying to scale a fence into Givat Hameyasdim in Ma’aleh Adumim, a spokesman for the Judea and Samaria police said.
The officers were responding to a call from a local security guard and fired into the air while arresting the man. The man, who police said is from the village of a-Ram, was not harmed in the incident.
Police said they are still trying to determine his motives.