Two men in a vehicle, equipped with a handgun and an American M16 assault rifle, shot on the morning of Thursday, November 30, at people waiting at a bus stop in a Jewish neighborhood in east of Jerusalem. They killed two women aged 24 and 60, as well as a 73-year-old man, a judge at the Ashdod rabbinical court. Six other people were injured, two of them seriously. The attackers were shot dead by two soldiers and an armed civilian – who in the confusion fired at an Israeli civilian, causing his death a few hours later.
The modus operandi is classic, but it had not been seen since the wave of attacks which shook Israel from March 2022. Jerusalem was experiencing a precarious calm, but this is not the first attack to hit it since the Hamas massacre on October 7. On October 12, two police officers were injured in front of the Shalem police station on Salah-Al-Din Street – the Palestinian part of the city. A 21-year-old young man shot them with a homemade firearm.
On October 30, late in the morning, a knife attack occurred at a gas station in the Cheikh Jarrah district, often frequented by law enforcement officers, many of whom pass through this heavily guarded area, not far from the Damascus Gate, one of the entrances to the old city. Another injured police officer. The perpetrator of the attack, a 17-year-old Palestinian minor, was killed after a brief chase. And a week later, on November 6, two members of the Israeli border guards were attacked at Herod’s Gate by another minor, also Palestinian, armed with a knife. One of the officials, a 20-year-old American-Israeli woman, died of her injuries. The Palestinian, aged 16, was shot dead. He was from Issawiya, east of the city.
Two brothers carried out Thursday’s attack, Murad and Ibrahim Namer, aged 38 and 30. Originally from the Palestinian neighborhood of Sur Baher, in East Jerusalem, they were both affiliated with Hamas, according to Shin Beth, the Israeli domestic intelligence service. They had been imprisoned for terrorist activities. The first was put behind bars between 2010 and 2020. The second, in 2014. Murad Namer was considered dangerous and had been placed in solitary confinement during his detention, with a ban on seeing his family.
Their links with Hamas should not suggest that the act was ordered by the Islamist organization, believes Michael Milstein, head of the Palestinian studies forum at the Moshe Dayan center. “This looks like an independent initiative, although it shows that Hamas still has the means to encourage terrorist acts outside its territory. I think the idea was to take revenge for the very high number of casualties in Gaza. The impact of the events happening in the enclave is very strong, on many different groups, in the West Bank, in East Jerusalem but also in the Arab sector in Israel. »
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