Hamas on Wednesday night welcomed the terrorist attack in Gush Etzion, in which three soldiers suffered injuries when an Arab driver ran over them with a car.
In a message the group published on its Al-Aqsa TV, Hamas said the terrorist attack “is proof that the Palestinian resistance continues and that [Judea and Samaria] are a strategic part of it.”
In Wednesday evening’s attack, a terrorist driving a Palestinian Arab commercial vehicle attempted to run over soldiers who were on duty near a guard stand outside of Kafr Al-Arub.
The driver then fled the scene, driving southward. Security forces located the car a short time later, but the driver was nowhere to be found. The soldiers were taken to hospital for treatment.
The attack was the second one in eight hours. Earlier Wednesday, a car terror attack in Jerusalem killed a Border Patrol officer, and injured 13 others. Two people are in critical condition and three in moderate condition.
The terrorist, Ibrahim Al-Akari, a resident of Shuafat in eastern Jerusalem, ran over a group of pedestrians, continued driving and struck another vehicle traveling along the road. He hit another vehicle before being stopped.
Al-Akari descended from the vehicle with a crowbar and began attacking passers-by. Police and Border Patrol officers shot him and killed him.
Hamas praised the earlier attack as well, saying it was “the natural response to the crimes of the (Israeli) occupation”.
“Hamas salutes its hero-martyr Ibrahim al-Akari, likewise hero-martyrs Abdelrahman Shaludi and Muataz Hijazi,” the Islamist group said in a statement, referring to the perpetrators of two recent terrorist attacks in Jerusalem.
Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri told AFP on Wednesday that Akari had acted in a “natural response to the crimes of the (Israeli) occupation against Al-Aqsa mosque and occupied Jerusalem.”
In an almost identical call to one made by Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas last month, Abu Zuhri urged “all Palestinians to use all means to oppose the crimes of the occupiers against Al-Aqsa.”
