Stabbing victim buried
There was a feeling of deja vu at a cold Jerusalem cemetery on Tuesday. Another week, another young woman lowered into the ground, her life ended by terror. Shlomit Krigman (pictured), 23, was buried next to 38-year-old Dafna Meir.
The circumstances of their deaths were similar – both were fatally stabbed by Palestinians in West Bank settlements. Two terrorists attacked Krigman on Monday, outside a mini market in the West Bank settlement of Beit Horon. They also stabbed another woman, a 58-year-old who was moderately wounded, and threw pipe bombs at the mini market – before being killed by a security guard as they fled.
If a cashier had not barricaded the entrance to the shop with a trolley, it’s thought that there would have been more victims. The attack came two days after a failed stabbing in another settlement, Anatot. On Saturday, a Palestinian girl charged at a security guard there with a knife.
The guard shot the terrorist, 13, and she later died. She is thought to have carried out the attack after a blazing row with her parents, in a state of rage which she directed at the guard.
At Krigman’s funeral a close friend, around her age, sobbed into the microphone, struggling to get the words out to describe the “optimistic” student. Israel’s Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi David Lau told mourners of Krigman’s qualities, and how she “ran to help others” in her role as a leader in Bnei Akiva and in the concluding project of her industrial design degree, which she recently completed.
She had instituted a program to establish “social public libraries” where people leave books they have finished with for others to read. Avshalom Salok, a senior figure in Bnei Akiva, described her as a “beautiful girl with great inner strength”. Just hours after the funeral, the Beit Horon area again became a terrorist target. A Palestinian driver rammed his car through an Israeli checkpoint, injuring soldiers.
The lack of intelligence ahead of West Bank attacks is posing major problems for Israeli anti-terror forces – and Palestinian incitement is believed to be ensuring a steady flow of attackers.
The Shin Bet this week announced that it believes that the 15-year-old who is thought to have killed Meir last week was spurred by incitement on the official television channel of the Palestinian Authority.
Israel’s Defence Minister Moshe Ya’alon admitted on Monday that there is no “magic solution” for ending the terror, but promised: “Despite the challenge we face, we’ll beat them.”
NATHAN JEFFAY
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