The Jerusalem district prosecutor submitted an indictment to the district youth court against three 16-year-old Arab terrorists from Jabel Mukaber in the city’s southeast on Friday, for their stabbing attack on the Haas Promenade in the capital’s Armon Hanatziv in early May.
In the attack the masked terrorists stabbed and moderately wounded two elderly women in the 80s as they walked with their friends, who testified that after the stabbing Arab workers at the site ignored their requests for help.
The three are accused on charges of providing aid to the enemy in a time of war, attempted murder, possession of a knife, disrupting legal proceedings and additional crimes.
The indictment reveals that the three planned to conduct a lethal stabbing attack for several months based on ideological motives, before finally launching their plans and attacking the two women, one aged 84 and the other 86.
Even after the attack the three Arab minors planned to conduct another stabbing attack, although police got to them first.
During the month of February two of the terrorists reached a decision to launch a stabbing attack against Jewish civilians or security forces, with a goal of murdering them and becoming “martyrs.”
The three terrorists wrote back and forth in private messages on Facebook, and agreed on launching a suicidal knife attack with a goal of murdering Jews and dying “a martyr’s death,” which the Palestinian Authority (PA) regularly lauds as the highest honor in Islam.
They agreed on a date and location for a meeting between them before launching the attack, and they determined they would arm themselves with a knife and ax.
On May 6 they discussed several possible targets for launching their attack, and in the end chose the Armon Hanatziv neighborhood in southeastern Jerusalem. They set to meet on May 10 at 7 a.m. in Jabel Mukaber, and then to head over to the Jewish neighborhood to stab Jews.
The day of the attack
On the morning of the attack, one of the terrorists met his cousin as he walked to the meeting point and told him he was on his way to conduct a terror attack. He gave the cousin his cell phone and asked him to give the phone to his family if he died.
One of the terrorists brought a knife and ax, and the three decided that only two of them would take part in the attack while the third minor would launch a lethal stabbing attack on a bus with a goal of murdering a Jew, after the other two had already died in their attack.
Just around 8 a.m. on the morning the attack, the terrorists spotted a group of visibly Jewish elderly women walking on the Haas Promenade, with two of them walking in front, two others walking a short distance behind them, and an additional elderly women walking in the back.
The terrorists decided to attack the elderly women one after the other. They took out the knife and ax they had hidden in their bags and quickly approached from behind the 84-year-old woman who was walking after her friends.
The two terrorists caught her by surprise and attacked her with the knife and ax with the intention of murdering her, and inflicted several stab wounds to her upper body and leg.
Afterwards they ran at the 86-year-old woman who was next in line and attacked her with the weapons as well.
Upon hearing the shouts of their friends telling them to run the other elderly women fled for their lives, and the two terrorists gave up on pursuit and abandoned the site.
After the attack the third terrorist contacted the two on Facebook and asked to plan another stabbing with the goal of murdering a Jew. The two terrorists agreed to meet and talk about the plan in the coming days.
Afterwards the terrorists erased their Facebook accounts and all of their correspondence on the matter, in a failed attempt to disrupt the police investigation that eventually found them.
