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Teen terrorist caught after wounding two in Jerusalem

The 15-year-old walked up to the religious Jewish men’s car and shot them at close range.

By Batya Jerenberg, World Israel News

A 15-year-old Palestinian was captured early Wednesday morning, less than a day after wounding two Jewish men in Jerusalem, one moderately and one lightly.

Based on information provided by Shabak intelligence, the IDF and the National Counter Terror Unit (Yamam) arrested Ibrahim Zemar in a brief raid of his home in the Askar refugee camp near Shechem (Nablus). He did not resist arrest and admitted to the attack.

The teen, who had crossed illegally from Judea and Samaria, approached his victims’ car when they were stopped in traffic at an intersection in the Sheikh Jarrah/Shimon HaTzadik neighborhood. After hitting them from nearly point-blank range, he disappeared, and a large manhunt ensued.

A few hours after the incident, Ynet reported, Zemar uploaded to Facebook a video clip of the attack, which helped the security forces find him.

Both victims are Breslov Hasidim who prayed daily in a synagogue in the neighborhood. Menashe, the son of the moderately wounded man, Rabbi Moshe Yosef Hess, told Ynet that his father continued to go even though the family had warned him numerous times that the road was unsafe.

“He prayed for years in the same place,” said Menashe. “He is not one of those people who pay attention to the security warnings. Maybe in more tense times he would travel by car and less so on foot. I can say that I don’t dare to use this route.”

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Shimon HaTzadik is on the edge of eastern Jerusalem and has been a flashpoint over recent years, with Arabs attacking Jews numerous times. It was especially volatile in 2021, when the courts ordered the eviction of several Arab families from Jewish-owned properties because they had refused to pay even a symbolic rent for years.

His father had not understood at first what had happened, the younger Hess said, thinking initially that stones were being thrown at the car. “After that he started to feel terrible pain and he realized that they had been shot.”

“You can see in the video clip that the terrorist stopped shooting because his gun jammed, so in my opinion a miracle happened,” he added.

A homemade “Carlo” submachine gun was found near the scene. These weapons, while deadly, are assembled illegally in Arab workshops and are very unreliable.

“The driver who was traveling with my father was more lightly injured, because he simply realized that if he stayed in the traffic that was there, which the terrorist took advantage of, it could have ended much worse,” Hess said. He managed to get around the traffic jam and drive to a place where the emergency medical services could evacuate them to a hospital.

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Police Commissioner Kobi Shabtai praised the security forces’ quick work.

“Let every terrorist know that the long hand of the security system will reach wherever he escapes to and wherever he hides,” he said.

Shabtai added that the Jerusalem police and border guards successfully prevented several terrorists from carrying out their deadly plans in recent weeks, adding they “foiled eight terrorist attacks during Ramadan.”