During Passover [“15-Apr-14: Seder night shooting attack: dead and wounded Israeli victims“], we wrote:
In the final minutes before the onset of Passover on Monday evening, an Israeli family fromModi’in, traveling on Highway 35by car to a family seder in the Jewish community of Kiryat Arba came under fire near the Arab village of Idhna (population 19,000). The driver, a man in his forties and a police officer (according to a report from Israel National News: “Terrorist Murders Man and Wounds Family in Hevron“) was shot to death. His pregnant wife was struck by bullets as well and evacuated to Jerusalem’s Shaarei Zedek Medical Center in moderate to critical condition. One of their children sitting in the back seat was also hit by bullets; we don’t yet know of his condition.[UPDATE: 11:00 pm Tuesday: The man murdered in yesterday’s shooting is Police Chief Superintendent Baruch Mizrahi, described as a senior police intelligence and crime officer, and a father of five whose wife, also wounded, is pregnant. In this Hebrew news report, he is described as head of SigInt, or signals intelligence, in the Investigations and Intelligence arm of Israel Police. The indiscriminate shooters and their terrorist accomplices may come to rue their inadvertent choice of target. The funeral has been announced for 1:00 pm Wednesday in Jerusalem’s Mt Herzl military cemetery.] Times of Israel [“Israeli man killed, two injured in terror attack near Hebron“] reported shortly after the attack that the IDF’s initial investigation indicated the shooter had approached the road on foot, and opened fire with dozens of rounds from an automatic weapon, evidently an AK47 rifle, seeking to hit passing Israeli vehicles. Quoting an eye-witness, the report says two cars were struck in the hail of fire but managed to escape the scene, after which the family from Modi’in became the principal victims of the terrorism. To this hour, relatively little media attention (for example, at the BBC) has been given outside Israel to the killing – coming as it has on the twelfth anniversary of the Park Hotel Seder Night massacre in Netanya – or its impact on terrorism-addicted Palestinian Arab society. Two American newspapers are notable exceptions.
Today, following the lifting of a gag order, it’s revealed that a Hamas terrorist, convicted but released by the Government of Israel in the infamous Gilad Shalit Transaction in 2011, has been arrested for the killing of Police Chief Superintendent Baruch Mizrahi. Times of Israel says
Ziad Awad and his son Izz Eddin Hassan Ziad Awad were arrested on May 7 by the Israel Police’s elite counter-terrorism unit in collaboration with the Shin Bet security service for the April 14 shooting of the 47-year-old father of five. The senior Awad is accused of carrying out the shooting, while his son allegedly assisted him in planning the shooting and coordinating the escape.
The widening ripples of human tragedy that emanate from the decision to free 1,027 unrepentant and convicted felons, most of them killers, attract very little media attention. But the victims – a growing class of Israelis – know. And our task is to remind others of the huge price ordinary people pay when politicians improperly make decisions for which they are ill-fitted.