Woman stabbed in East Jerusalem in apparent terror attack; suspect nabbed

An Israeli woman who was walking with her children was stabbed in the back and lightly wounded at the entrance to the flashpoint Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood in East Jerusalem in a suspected terror attack on Wednesday morning, police said.

Police officers arrested a teenage girl suspected of carrying out the attack a short time later in a nearby school, following a brief search.

Police said the suspect was a 14-year-old girl who lived in Sheikh Jarrah . The Jewish Israeli victim, 26, was also a resident of the neighborhood.

“Large numbers of police forces were called to the scene and launched wide searches for the suspect, using a police helicopter,” police said.

According to police, the suspect stabbed the woman in the back as the victim was walking with her children to school and then fled the area. The attack was being treated as a suspected terror attack, police said.

“We are in a period in which we have seen a series of incidents like this in the Jerusalem area,” a police spokesperson told Army Radio shortly after the attack, referring to a spate of stabbing attacks in and around the Old City of Jerusalem in recent weeks.

Medics were quickly called to the scene and treated the injured Israeli woman before taking her to the nearby Hadassah Mount Scopus Hospital, with the knife still lodged in her upper back, which doctors said helped stem the bleeding until she reached the hospital.

A spokeswoman for the hospital said that the woman was brought in with light injuries, and was fully conscious. Medics had initially said the woman sustained serious injuries.

“Luckily, they brought her in with the knife still in her back, as they should. She reached the trauma center and we checked her and stabilized her, and we were able to remove the knife,” Dr. Hagi Mazeh, the head of the hospital’s trauma center, told reporters.

Medics said the woman’s children were unharmed in the attack and remained with police officers at the scene.

“When we arrived we saw near the entrance to Sheikh Jarrah a woman with children who was on her way to drop them off at their schools when she was stabbed,” medics said. “She was ambulatory and fully conscious.”

The incident is the latest in a string of similar terrorist attacks in Jerusalem. On Saturday, a Palestinian terrorist stabbed a man walking next to the Old City of Jerusalem before being shot dead by Border Police officers.

Sheikh Jarrah has emerged as a major source of conflict in recent months due to a long-simmering dispute over a number of homes in the neighborhood that several Palestinian families have been living in for decades, but which Jewish groups claim legally belong to them.

Many Palestinians and their supporters see that conflict as part of a larger effort by Israel to strip them of their property rights. It, along with a dispute at the time over the Temple Mount, played a key role in the Hamas terror group’s decision to fire a barrage of rockets at Jerusalem in May, sparking a brutal 11-day conflict in the Gaza Strip.