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In a suspected terror attack on Wednesday morning, an Israeli mother walking with her children was stabbed in the back and mildly injured at the entrance to the sensitive Sheikh Jarrah district in East Jerusalem, police said.
A teenage girl accused of carrying out the attack was apprehended by police at her local school a short time later. Her father and mother and another pupil, a teacher, and the school’s principal were all arrested for questioning.
The suspect, police said, was a 14-year-old girl from Sheikh Jarrah. She is a member of a well-known local family whose home, like many others in Sheikh Jarrah, is engulfed in a legal struggle with Jewish organisations claiming ownership.
Moriah Cohen, a 26-year-old Jewish Israeli victim, was also a resident of the area.
“It appears to have been one of our neighbours, an Arab who lives next door.” She went after her. They are familiar with us because they live directly across the street. Because I was on reserve duty and couldn’t assist, my wife was strolling with all five of our children. Cohen’s husband, Dvir, told reporters outside the hospital where she was being treated, “She walked up to her at the intersection… and stabbed her.”
The guy allegedly stabbed the mother in the back while she was walking her children to school and then fled the scene.
“A large number of police forces were dispatched to the location, and a police aircraft was used to conduct a wide search for the culprit,” police added.
Paramedics swiftly treated the injured Israeli woman before being sent to the neighbouring Hadassah Mount Scopus Hospital. The knife remained lodged in her upper back, which doctors say helped stop the bleeding until she arrived.
According to a hospital spokeswoman, the woman was lightly injured and completely conscious.
“Fortunately, they brought her in with the knife still lodged in her back, as it should have been.” Dr Hagi Mazeh, the hospital’s trauma centre director, told reporters, “She arrived at the trauma centre, and we checked her and stabilised her, and we were able to remove the knife.”
Cohen was released from the hospital later that afternoon, according to Mazeh, after undergoing surgery to fix the damage inflicted by the knife.
On December 8, 2021, a still shot from surveillance footage shows a suspect in the stabbing of an Israeli woman in the Sheikh Jarrah area of Jerusalem. (Israel Police Forces)