A 16-year-old boy was killed and over twenty people were injured when two powerful bombs exploded in western Jerusalem early morning Wednesday.
“The first explosion occurred close to the main entrance of Jerusalem in Givat Shaul, shortly after 7 a.m., peak commuter hour. The second blast occurred shortly after 7:30 a.m., at Ramot junction, another entrance to Jerusalem,” The Times of Israel reported.
The remotely operated bombs that went off during rush hour were packed with nails to cause maximum harm to commuters. A police spokesman described the bombs as “two high-quality, powerful explosive devices with a high level of damage.”
“The preliminary investigation reveals the explosive devices were placed in bags near the bus stops by two separate perpetrators and detonated remotely using cellphones,” the Israeli news website Ynet News reported.
The sole victim was identified as 16-year-old Canadian national Aryeh Shchupak, who was on his way to a yeshiva, a Jewish religious school.
The Jerusalem Post reported the details of the bombings:
At least one person was killed and 19 wounded in two explosions in bus stops at separate entrances to Jerusalem on Wednesday morning, in what police are treating as a coordinated double terror attack.The fatality was identified as 16-year-old Aryeh Shechopek, who was on his way to a yeshiva in a nearby community when the explosion occurred. The Canadian citizen lived in the capital’s Har Nof neighborhood.Both explosions, one at the entrance to the city near the Central Bus Station and the other in the Ramot neighborhood, occurred at bus stops during rush hour. The explosive devices were said to have been placed in bags left at the stations. (…)One of the injured was Naomi Pilichowski, the daughter of Uri Pilichowski, a Jerusalem Post columnist and a well-known American-Israeli educator who works at Nefesh B’Nefesh, and Mitzpe Yericho Mayor Aliza Pilichowski. She was lightly injured in the attack.
Palestinian terrorist groups hailed the twin bombings that took the life of a teenager and left several innocent Israelis critically injured. The Gaza-based terrorist group Hamas and Iran-sponsored Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) issued statements glorifying the attack.
The Israeli TV channel i24News reported:
The Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) extremist group issued a statement on Wednesday praising two terrorist attacks that killed at least 1 and wounded nearly 20 in Jerusalem, shortly after Hamas also welcomed the explosions. (…)“The operation in the occupied city of Jerusalem is a natural response to the occupation, its terrorism, and its criminal practices against the defenseless Palestinian people and their holy sites,” PIJ said in a statement.“The operation says to the leaders of the Occupation and the leaders of the settlers that none of the policies of your criminal government will protect you from the strikes of our people’s resistance,” it added. (…)”The Zionist occupation is paying the price today for its crimes and aggression against our people and the Al-Aqsa Mosque, and we have warned about this repeatedly,” the spokesman for Hamas, Abd Latif al-Kanou, said.”Our people will not remain silent in the face of this, and the outrage Al-Aqsa will explode and spread in all regions,” he added.
Palestinians resident in the Israeli city of Hebron and the West Bank were seen distributing sweets to ‘celebrate’ the terror blasts, social media posts show.
In another inhuman act, the Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) terrorist group, on Wednesday, pulled an Israeli teenager off life support and took away his body. On Tuesday, 17-year-old Tiran Ferro was seriously injured in a car crash outside the Palestinian town of Jenin and was rushed to a nearby West Bank hospital for emergency surgeries.
The boy “was still alive” when PIJ gunman stormed the hospital and took his body,” The Jerusalem Post reported. “He was in critical but stable condition and removing him from the ventilator is what killed him, the father and uncle Hady Ferro claim,” the newspaper quoted his family members.
The newspaper Israel Hayom reported the heinous incident:
Israeli authorities assess that the Palestinian Islamic Jihad terrorist group is involved in an incident Wednesday morning in which a body of an Israeli man killed in a car crash was taken by paramedics rather than handed back to Israel. A renegade Fatah group claimed responsibility later for taking the body, with some family members of the deceased telling Army Radio that the man was taken off life support at the hospital before being snatched, essentially killing him in the process.https://twitter.com/AviMayer/status/1595398855880839168
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