Yeshiva head killed, 3 family members injured in drive-by shooting near Hebron
A rabbi who heads a West Bank yeshiva was killed Friday afternoon and his wife and children were injured when their family car came under gunfire from a passing vehicle and overturned, south of the West Bank city of Hebron.
The victim of the terror attack was named as 48-year-old Miki Mark, director of the yeshiva in nearby Otniel. Mark, a father of nine and the cousin of Mossad chief Yossi Cohen, had lived in the settlement with his family for years.
Mark’s wife was seriously injured in the attack near Beit Hagai on Route 60. Their 14-year-old daughter was in moderate-to-serious condition and their 15-year-old son was lightly injured. Earlier reports of an infant in the vehicle were apparently mistaken.
An initial investigation indicated the terrorists passed the family’s car with their vehicle, then opened fire at them. Officials said over 20 bullet holes were found in the victims’ car.
The victims were taken Hadassah Hospital Ein Kerem in Jerusalem for treatment. The wounded woman sustained serious head injuries from the gunfire. She was unconscious and respirated as she was hospitalized, Magen David Adom said.
It was not immediately clear how many were injured from the initial gunfire and how many were hurt in the ensuing accident.
Hamas praised the attack, with an announcer on its TV channel saying it was a response to “crimes against the Palestinian people,” according to Army Radio. The group did not claim responsibility for the shooting.
Netanyahu: ‘You don’t murder a sleeping child for peace’
Full text of a video message by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in the wake of the killing of Hallel Yaffa Ariel, 13, by a Palestinian terrorist on June 30, 2016:
“This morning a terrorist sneaked into the bedroom of a 13-year-old girl, Hallel-Yaffa Ariel. He murdered young Hallel in cold blood. A picture of her blood stained room is almost too hard to see. There’s a teddy bear still on her bed, a red beanbag chair, some pictures on the wall, shoes tightly packed in a bin next to her bunk bed.
“Why would any person do this?
“You don’t murder a sleeping child for peace. You don’t slit a little girl’s throat to protest a policy you don’t like.
“You do this because you’ve been brainwashed. You’ve been brainwashed by a warped ideology that teaches you that this child isn’t human.
“We will not let barbarism defeat humanity.
“There’s no middle ground between beautiful Hallel and her unspeakably evil murderer.
PMW: Terrorist who butchered female hikers is PA TV’s “heroic prisoner”
Last week, official Palestinian Authority TV decided to honor Palestinian terrorist murderer Kifah Ghneimat. On Dec. 18, 2010, Ghneimat and his accomplice Iyad Fataftah attacked and stabbed two women, Kristine Luken - an American citizen and member of the Church's Ministry among Jewish People (CMJ), and British Israeli Kay Wilson, as they were hiking in a forest near Beit Shemesh. Luken was brutally stabbed to death and Wilson was critically injured and left for dead. After the terrorists fled the scene, Wilson forced herself to get up and walk for help. Wilson has described the attack, the cruelty of the terrorists and her will to survive:
“He stabs me in the back so hard that I fall to the ground...
and he is repeatedly plunging his machete into me.
He's doing it with such force that I can hear my bones crunch
and as he tugs out that serrated blade I hear my flesh rip”