Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Yaalon declared that Wednesday’s terrorist at a Light Rail station in Jerusa;lem, in which a 3-month-old baby was killed and eight other people injured, was “clearly the outcome of those in the Palestinian Authority who educate the younger generation to hate Jews and expel them from their homeland.”
The attack occurred when an East Jerusalem member of Hamas, Abdel Rahman Al-Shaludi, 21, from Silwan, plowed his car into a train platform in the capital Wednesday night.
Yaalon added, “The Palestinian Authority does not, and never did, have a culture of peace, but rather a culture of incitement and jihad against Jews. It starts with Abbas’s lying statements against Israel from the UN podium, continues with persistent Palestinian attempts to delegitimize us in the international arena and ends with incitement in the Palestinian education system. These are the harsh consequences.”
“This is why we say time and again that the roots of the conflict are not territorial, but rather the fact that the Palestinians refuse to accept our right to exist as a Jewish state within any borders at all,” the Defense Minister concluded.
Israel’s President Reuven Rivlin said in a statement: “The atrocious murder of an innocent baby girl, a victim of indiscriminate terrorism, should disgust all those who have a heart.”
“The increasing incitement on the Arab streets and the streets of Jerusalem, which unfortunately receives the backing of leaders in the Arab world, has the ability to destroy the delicate balance of life in Jerusalem, and carry us all into a maelstrom of destruction and pain,” Rivlin said. “As a sovereign people in our own country, and capital city, it is the security forces alone, who have the responsibility to act, decisively and unashamedly, in the face of these brutal terrorist operations.
Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, meanwhile, linked Wednesday’s terror attack to the armed assault on Parliament Hill in Ottawa, Canada, by a man who had converted to Islam.
“The terrorist attacks that took place almost simultaneously yesterday in two parts of the world, Jerusalem and Ottawa, prove once again that terrorism is a global plague that must be fought forcefully and uncompromisingly.”
Economy Minister Naftali Bennett said that Israel should respond to the attack, and to other recent unrest among the Palestinian population, by announcing the construction of more housing units in Jerusalem and assert sovereignty over the city.
“He who is afraid to build houses in Jerusalem, he who ignores rock-hurling in the capital, he who allows gas and train stations to be burned, announces that he has given up on sovereignty over Jerusalem,” he said.
Speaking to Army Radio on Thursday morning, Bennett stressed that Wednesday’s attack was directly linked to the “endless” incidents of rock-hurling and Molotov cocktail use against the city’s infrastructure and Jewish houses in recent months.
“There has been no adequate response to these incidents,” Bennett said, adding that the attacks proved it was “not desperation that drives our enemies,” but “the hope of kicking us out of here” with more and more terrorist attacks.
According to the Israeli media, the Palestinian man who drove his car into a crowd of pedestrians in Jerusalem was the nephew of a top Hamas commander, and had posted multiple messages on the internet supporting Hamas and Palestinian terror groups, including suicide attackers.
Abdel Rahman Al-Shaludi used his Facebook account to share pictures, videos, and links to websites that identify with Hamas, as well as making repeated calls for the defense of Al-Aqsa, the mosque that stands atop Jerusalem’s Temple Mount, Ynet news reported.
According to Palestinian media, his uncle was Mohiyedine Sharif, a master bomb-maker for Hamas who was assassinated in 1998, apparently during internal conflicts between Palestinian militias.
In his last post from a week and a half ago, Shaludi shared a video of Hamas’s military wing, the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades, during training. A caption with the clip carried the message, “See how the suicide members of the Qassam brigades train.”
A day before that he posted a picture of the Al-Aqsa mosque with a caption declaring “Al-Aqsa is in danger,” to which he added his own comment: “Go forth on a march to Al-Aqsa, good morning.”
Other posts included video clips of Israeli border police clashing with rioters on the Temple Mount, to which he added the message, “God of the universe, protect your house.”
He also called for the release of Arab prisoners held in Israel prisons and shared purported footage of Hamas operatives battling IDF soldiers in Gaza during Operation Protective Edge this summer.
Palestinian media reported that Shaludi was released from Israeli prison in December 2013 after spending 16 months behind bars. He was rearrested in February 2014, apparently on charges of public disturbance, and released a month later.