“Today was my turn,” said a resident of Elazar in Gush Etzion in the West Bank, referring to his brush with Palestinian terrorism on Wednesday morning.
Driving on the Tekoa road to Jerusalem — which he took because his Waze satellite warned of traffic on his regular route — freelance journalist Josh Hasten (a show host at the now-defunct Voice of Israel online radio station) found himself prey to a mob of Arabs in balaclavas preparing to pummel him with rocks and concrete blocks.
“And it happened a mere 500 meters away from a checkpoint manned with IDF soldiers,” Hasten told The Algemeiner.
The checkpoint in question is the roadblock between the east Jerusalem Arab village of Sur Baher and the Israeli neighborhood, Har Homa. It was here, shortly before Hasten was confronted with dozens of young men on the rampage against passing Jews, that 38-year-old Rivi Lev Ohayon was nearly lynched.
Lev Ohayon was on her way to work in Jerusalem from her home in Tekoa, when she was ambushed by a group of rock-wielding Palestinians, who shattered her car’s windows. One of them began to beat her, while trying to pull her out of the vehicle.
“I saw my death,” she told a Channel 2 news team from her Jerusalem hospital bed, where she is being treated for light wounds – which could have been far greater had Lev Ohayon not managed to accelerate and tear away from her attackers. Rather than wait for an ambulance to arrive at the nearby checkpoint, as she was instructed to do when she phoned for help, she drove home, where paramedics whisked her off to the hospital.