Alert Border Guard Police officers prevented a Palestinian Arab from carrying out a terror attack Tuesday evening.
The soldiers noticed the suspect attempting to throw away a box-cutter as he approached the security checkpoint at the Tapuach Junction near Shechem (Nablus) in Samaria.
During their routine search the soldiers also discovered the suspect was carrying a kitchen knife as well. The suspect was taken into custody and turned over to security personnel for questioning.
Earlier in the day, an IDF soldier was wounded during clashes with Palestinian Arabs in the Gush Etzion area of Judea on Tuesday.
The soldier was struck by a rock thrown by one of the rioting Arabs and received medical treatment at the scene for facial wounds.
The continued violence makes it clear that either Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas has lost his credibility in the Palestinian street, or he has made it clear to the street that his words earlier in the day were spoken for international media and political purposes only.
Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas reportedly attempted to dial back the violence Tuesday during a meeting with members of the executive committee of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). In a statement calling for public calm, Abbas said, “We want to reach a political solution peacefully.
“We tell them (the Israelis) that we do not want either military or security escalation,” he continued. “All our instructions to our (security) agencies, our factions and our youth have been that we do not want escalation.”
Abbas also did a complete turnaround on his statement at the United Nations General Assembly last week, in which he bluntly declared the Palestinian Authority was no longer bound to meet its obligations under the internationally recognized Oslo Accords that it signed with Israel in 1993.
On Tuesday, Abbas said: “We are committed to these agreements, but it is unreasonable for us to be the only ones who are committed to them. If Israel does not want these agreements, we do not want to implement them.”
The Palestinian Authority has yet to meet the conditions of the Accords, even for its own people, which include the general election of a self-governing Council within a five-year period: Abbas has overstayed his four-year term by six years so far. Moreover, Palestinian Arab areas of Judea, Samaria and Gaza are to be governed under a Palestinian Council as “a single territorial unit.” In fact, since ousting the Fatah faction from Gaza in 2007, that region has been ruled separately with an iron fist by the Hamas terrorist organization — which maintains in its founding charter the vow to annihilate the State of Israel. This violates the first condition of the Oslo Accords: to renounce terror.
And so on …
Which agreements, exactly, did Mahmoud Abbas say he was committed to?