Third stabbing attack, in the last week, in Israel.
Four Israelis - including 2 women and 2 men according to the latest information - were killed in a bombing in Beersheva. The terrorist - identified as Mohammad Ghaleb Abu al-Qi'an, a 34-year-old teacher from the Bedouin city of Hura in the Negev desert - stabbed three of the victims and hit the fourth with a car.
At that point - as the images of some videos released on social media and taken by the media show - he was confronted, it seems, by a bus driver who got off to help the victims. The driver, who was armed, tried to get the terrorist to lower the knife but when he launched himself to strike, he fired. Abu al-Qi'an - who died of his wounds - had been, the media recalled, 4 years in prison after being arrested in 2015 by Israeli security forces for trying to reach Isis in Syria. And also, according to the same sources, for trying to recruit new followers of the Islamic State from among the students.
On the new attack, Prime Minister Naftali Bennett immediately held a meeting with the Minister of Public Security Omer Bar-Lev and with the police chief Kobi Shabtai. "The security forces are on maximum alert and we will respond with a heavy hand to the terrorists. We will pursue and capture - he said - even their accomplices".
Hamas and Islamic Jihad from Gaza called the attack "a heroic operation in occupied Beersheva". "The crimes of the occupation - said the spokesman Abd al-Latif al-Qanou - must be faced with heroic operations: stabbings, investments and shootings".
(Unioneonline / D)