A young mother was stabbed in the back by a Palestinian teenage girl in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood while carrying a baby in a morning walk to school with her 4 other children.
By Erin Viner
26-year-old Moriah Cohen was stabbed in front of her young children, who were uninjured in the attack and were safeguarded by police officers who were called to the site.
Emergency medical paramedics rushed the victim to the nearby Hadassah Mount Scopus Hospital, with the knife still lodged in her upper back. She is now in stable condition.
Surveillance footage captured an image of the assailant fleeing the scene.
The 14-year-old Palestinian suspect was detained at a local school following a massive manhunt by security forces, including use of a police helicopter. The principal, another student and both of the alleged terrorist’s parents were also taken in for questioning.
Speaking to the media outside the facility where his wife is hospitalized, the victim’s husband Dvir Cohen identified the suspect as an Arab neighbor “who lives right next to us.” He said he was unable to accompany his wife this morning because he was called to military reserve duty.
Police said the suspect is a member of a well-known local family, whose Sheikh Jarrah home is among others currently the center of a decades-long legal battle with Jewish groups over ownership.
Bloody clashes between Arab rioters and Israeli police erupted last April during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan ahead of an expected decision on the property dispute by the Israeli High Court of Justice, which has since been delayed. In what the Israeli Foreign Ministry has described as a “real-estate dispute between private parties,” several Palestinian families had appealed lower court orders to vacate the premises based on documentation showing the land was owned by Jews who had been displaced in the 1948 division of the city.
Many Palestinians and their supporters view the neighborhood fight as part of a larger claim to Jerusalem, which they want as the capital of a future state. The Islamist Hamas terrorist rulers of Gaza reacted by firing hundreds of rockets at Jerusalem last May, that quickly ignited into the deadly 11-day Operation Guardian of the Walls.
There has been a wave of recent Palestinian terror attacks against Israelis over the past 3 weeks. In addition to an attempted vehicular homicide was perpetrated in the West Bank on Monday, there have been 4 attacks in Jerusalem that include 3 stabbings and the shooting murder of an Israeli civilian on 21 November.