The large low-priced Rami Levy supermarket chain and Victory supermarkets have taken knives off the shelves to prevent a customer-terrorist from carrying out a stabbing attack on the spot.
Anyone who wants to buy a kitchen knife at Rami Levy stores can do so by going to the customer’s service desk, but the new policy leaves knives and cleavers in the hands of workers, most of them Arabs, at the meat counter.
Rami Levy said:
There’s no point checking customers at the entrance, if they can buy a knife inside.
I’m afraid of letting in a customer who’d do something. Why should I give him the weapon? It’s not smart to put a guard on the door to check people and then give him a knife inside the store.
Arabs, including those from the Palestinian Authority who work at the company’s stores in Judea and Samaria, account for approximately two-thirds of the unskilled labor force in the chain’s supermarket.
Meat cleavers will remind in the hands of workers, most of them Arabs behind the meat counter, but Levy said his employees undergo a strict security check before being hired. He is more worried about the “lone wolf” customer who could pick up a knife off a shelf and start stabbing anyone within reach.
One customer told Globes that fewer customers are shopping at the Rami Levy market where he works “because they are afraid to come to us.”
Levy said that Jerusalem has become a “ghost town” but that sales at his stores have not been affected by the recent wave of terror.
Victory CEO Eyal Ravid told Globes:
Yesterday afternoon I took the knives down to the warehouse just to be certain that God forbid somebody won’t come and buy and use it.