Beit Hagai resident killed in shooting attack buried in Hebron.
By ERIK SCHECHTER, JPOST.COM STAFFcow.article(photo credit: )
Yossi Shok, the victim of Friday's shooting attack near Hebron, was buried on Sunday evening at the Jewish cemetary in Hebron.
The funeral procession set out from his south Hebron hills home of Beit Hagai just before noon.
No disturbances were recorded as the 1500-person-strong funeral cortege passed the location of the deadly ambush and entered Kiryat Arba, bearing the body of the father of five who was killed near his West Bank home.
The army stepped up security measures in the Hebron area over the weekend following the Palestinian attack on a carload of West Bank settlers in which Shok was killed.
Whereas right before the ambush, the army had removed a local checkpoint, some roads have now been blocked off to Palestinian traffic, the IDF Spokesman said.
Shok, a father of five, including an infant daughter, was shot in the head when Palestinians overtook and opened fire on his car in the southern Hebron hills.
The terrorists then escaped to the Fawwar refugee camp.
Two sisters who were passengers in the stricken vehicle were lightly wounded, and medics treated them at the scene of the attack.
Shok was initially listed in critical condition, but died shortly after being rushed to Jerusalem'sHadassah Ein Kerem Hospital.
One of the girls told TV's Channel 1 that, at first, she thought Palestinians were pelting their car with stones, "but then I realized that it wasn't because there was a lot of blood."
At that point, the two sisters ducked for cover by lying on their car seats.
Shok was a member of Beit Hagai's local council and leader of his settlement's emergency ready team.
"He was the best there was," said Shok friend and Beit Hagai spokesman Yair Lior. "He was a loving husband and father. He was deeply pained by the government's betrayal of the homeland, by the uprooting of Gush Katif."
The Islamic Jihad and the Fatah-affiliated Aksa Martyrs' Brigades took credit for the murder.
But Judea and Samaria Division Commander Yair Golan said that the specific attackers were part of the same cell of terrorists responsible for the deaths of five Israelis in the area.
Some four months ago, two Israeli teenagers, Avihai Levy and Aviad Mansour, were killed in a similar drive-by at the hitchhiking post near Beit Hagai.
Lior was critical of what he said was a too liberal attitude by the Sharon government towards the Palestinians.
"We pray that we will be delivered from this government that does not care about the spilled blood of Jews," he said.
Clashes continued in elsewhere in the territories over the weekend.
On Friday evening, an IDF post south of Nablus, unit near the village of Mizra A-Nabuni and a car near Kalkilya all came under fire, but there were no reported casualties. A Border Police jeep was damaged Saturday night when fired on by Palestinians near Kfar Salem.
Soldiers did arrest nine Hamas members in the West Bank, and on Saturday afternoon, a unit from the Nahshon Battalion wounded and apprehended a fleeing Islamic Jihad terrorist in Tulkarm.
Later, in the evening, troops from the Duhifat Battalion arrested near Kfar Kafin two teens who admitted to previously setting a booby-trapped tire along the security fence last week.
The bomb blew up before a patrol responded to the scene arrived.
