Soldier attacked with acid may lose eye

Army arrests female Palestinian assailant who carried out an identical attack earlier this month.

By YAAKOV KATZ
hawara crossing checkpoint 224 88 (photo credit: AP [file])
hawara crossing checkpoint 224 88
(photo credit: AP [file])
An IDF soldier may lose sight in one eye after a Palestinian woman threw acid in his face on Monday as she tried crossing the Hawara checkpoint outside Nablus. The soldier was hospitalized with light-to-moderate wounds and doctors said there was a chance that he would lose the sight in one of his eyes. The woman, identified as a 19-year-old resident of Nablus, was behind a similar attack earlier in the month when she threw acid in the face of an officer at the checkpoint but succeeded in fleeing back into Nablus. On Monday she was captured and taken into police custody. Lt. Avihai Weitzman, commander of the soldier's platoon, said that the wounded soldier was scheduled to undergo surgery on his eye on Tuesday. He said that the IDF would probe the incident and possibly change its deployment at the checkpoint. "Thousands of Palestinians go through the checkpoint every day and our job is to go after the terrorists and not civilians," he said. "We operate according to the threats that we see and after an incident like this we will investigate and find out what happened." Anan Abd el-Haq of Rafidiya Hospital in Nablus said soldiers wounded three bystanders with gunfire and shrapnel immediately after the incident. The military said, however, that soldiers fired only one shot in the air to keep the crowd at bay. The IDF said that the woman came to the checkpoint from Nablus and entered the "humanitarian lane" which is meant to be used by Palestinians who are in need of immediate medical attention and are therefore allowed to bypass an inspection in the regular lane. IDF sources said that the attack demonstrated a "cynical" use of IDF humanitarian efforts by Palestinian terrorists. The IDF, the sources stressed, had eased travel restrictions throughout the West Bank in recent weeks to enable Palestinians to travel more freely during the month of Ramadan. Meanwhile Monday, the IDF revealed that the Palestinian terrorist who was killed on Saturday as he tried infiltrating Yitzhar with a Molotov cocktail was the same terrorist who infiltrated the settlement a week earlier and stabbed a nine-year-old boy.