A Palestinian teenager attempted to stab police officers last night (8/5/17), outside of the Damascus Gate in Jerusalem’s Old City. The troops at the scene responded by opening fire at the teenager, who later was identified as a 16-year-old girl from a town near the West Bank city of Ramallah.
Police spokeswoman Luba Samri said a knife was recovered from the scene together with a farewell letter from the teenager to her family quoting a verse from the Koran that signed off with the word “shahida”, which is the Arabic word for ‘martyr’. The incident was the latest in a 19-month-long period of sporadic street attacks by Palestinians against Israelis, during which 37 Israelis, two visiting American tourists and one British foreign exchange student have been killed. During that same period of time, some 243 Palestinians have died, with at least 164 of them identified by Israel as Palestinians that conducted acts of terror against Israelis.