'I won't live in fear,' young man targeted in West Bank terror attack tells 'Post'

By YAAKOV LAPPIN
Just 24 hours earlier, Eitan Frankel was being rushed from the West Bank to Jerusalem in an ambulance after he and two friends were targeted by Palestinian gunmen. On Thursday night, Frankel, 18, was back home in Dolev, west of Ramallah, having escaped with minor shrapnel wounds to his face and hand. "I won't be scared to drive home. But on the other hand, this type of thing can always happen. It's good to always be vigilant, but not to live in fear. To be aware of the situation, and deal with it," he said. Frankel, Noam Ilani and Yitzhak Levi were driving north from Dolev to visit a friend in the Ma'aleh Levona settlement, about a 40-minute drive, on Wednesday night. "I was sitting in the back. As we approached Ma'aleh Levona, just a minute from the gate, we took a left turn around a bend. We saw a Mitsubishi on the side of the road with its hazard lights on," Frankel said on Thursday. "The car had yellow [Israeli] license plates, and did not look suspicious. The driver signalled from the window to us. We were sure this was an Israeli who needed help with a puncture," he added. Despite the seemingly safe scene, Frankel and his friends "proceeded cautiously. We didn't jump out of the car and say, 'What's the problem.' We pulled up slowly, parallel to the car, and lowered a window." At that point, a man "hiding in the bushes fired a shot, smashing the back right window. We hit the car floor, and immediately said, 'Let's get out of here.' "We started driving again, and heard six to seven shots ring out behind us. As we drove away we called the police and told them what was going on," Frankel said. "Itzik [Levy] had a big wound in his hand. It turned out a bullet scarped his hand. I was injured in the face and hand. And Noam got out of it without a scratch," he said. The threesome were met by paramedics and police at Ma'aleh Levona's gate, and taken to Hadassah University Medical Center in Jerusalem's Ein Kerem. Security forces have imposed a media ban on their investigation into the attack. Yehuda Ben-Eli, who lives in the Givat Haroeh outpost, near the scene, told The Jerusalem Post he saw "two suspicious figures 20 minutes before the shooting. I called the [Ma'aleh Levona] security officer out to the area. As he approached the figures, the shots were fired. At first we thought he was the one being targeted." Ben-Eli said the IDF and police "have abandoned us." In March, Traffic Police officers David Rabinovitch and Yehezkel Ramazreger were gunned down in a terrorist ambush in the Jordan Valley. In that attack, Palestinians pretended to require roadside assistance, employing the same deception used in Wednesday's shooting.