Patrol car driver moderately hurt in Atarot incident; assailant shot, critically wounded.
By ETGAR LEFKOVITS, REBECCA ANNA STOILborder police check ID(photo credit: Ariel Jerozolimski)
A Palestinian stabbed and moderately wounded a border policeman on the outskirts of Jerusalem on Saturday.
The attack in the Atarot industrial zone in the capital's far north was the third in the Jerusalem area in 48 hours.
Border Police said the victim had been in a jeep patrolling the area shortly before noon when the officers noticed a suspicious man walking near the zone's fence.
When they asked the man for identification, he pulled out a knife, opened the jeep's door and stabbed the driver in the neck and back, police said.
The attacker then tried to stab a female officer sitting in the back of the jeep. During the ensuing struggle, the patrol's commander shot the assailant in the leg, critically wounding him.
The driver and assailant were taken to Hadassah-University Hospital at Ein Kerem by Magen David Adom paramedics.
An initial investigation indicated that none of the patrol members was wearing flak jackets or stab vests.
The Battalions of Struggle and Return, a previously anonymous offshoot of Fatah's Aksa Martyrs Brigades, claimed responsibility for the attack, adding that the assailants managed to flee the scene.
Hours later, on Saturday evening, four Israelis - parents and two children - were lightly wounded by rocks thrown at them in Beit Umar, north of Hebron.
Also Saturday, border police at a checkpoint near the Machpela Cave in Hebron caught a Palestinian man concealing a 7-cm. knife. The knife was confiscated and the suspect was taken in for questioning.
On Thursday evening, border policeman Cpl. Rami Zoari, 20, was killed and another officer, Shoshana Samandoyev, 20, was seriously wounded in a shooting attack at a checkpoint at an entrance to the Shuafat refugee camp in east Jerusalem, and two terrorists were killed after they wounded three counselors at the Mekor Hayim High School Yeshiva in Kibbutz Kfar Etzion, south of the capital.
Zoari was laid to rest in the Beersheba Military Cemetery early Friday afternoon. Samandoyev is recovering at Hadassah-University Hospital.
Her mother, Larissa, told Public Security Minister Avi Dichter on Friday that after her daughter regained consciousness, she kept asking about her comrade.
The two terrorists involved in the Kfar Etzion attack had been recently released from Israeli prisons after completing brief sentences for membership in illegal organization.
Jerusalem police chief Cmdr. Aharon Franco noted that rulings by the High Court of Justice had delayed the completion of the security barrier around the Jerusalem area. He said roadblocks such as the one near Shuafat - located between the northern Jerusalem neighborhoods of French Hill and Pisgat Ze'ev - were "weak points."
Israel has completed about two-thirds of the barrier in the Jerusalem area.
He added that the recent attacks on security personnel in and around Jerusalem were connected to the volatile situation in Gaza, and said that in the coming days, Jerusalem police would step up measures meant to deter such attacks.
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