July 27, 2018: Yotam Ovadia, 31, succumbed to stab wounds sustained when a Palestinian teenager climbed the fence into the settlement colony of ‘Adam’ and stabbed Yotam and two others.
Yotam was the father of two young children, age 2 and 7 months, and worked as a technician with “Brinks Security Company”.
The Palestinian assailant, identified as Mohammad Tareq dar Yousef, 17, allegedly managed to climb over the fence into the illegal Israeli settlement of “Adam”, which had been built on stolen Palestinian land which was taken from his village, Kobar, near Ramallah. He then stabbed three people before he was shot and killed.
Another unnamed Israeli settler, age 50, ended up in critical condition with stab wounds to the upper body, according to Israeli media sources.
Before going to the settlement to carry out the attack, the young Palestinian wrote on his Facebook page, “After all of the injustice the Palestinians continue to face: the killing, the diaspora, the theft of land by force, this injustice still prevails, and many Palestinians are silent – including those who have weapons, and are watching the massacres. Those are the traitors.”
He goes on to say, “You [Palestinians] who own a weapon, remember this is for your enemy, not for use against your own people. Remember the children of Gaza, suffering and dying.” The statement ends, “A salute to the people who defend their land and their honor. And to those who sold their land and betrayed their country, those cowards, you must be ashamed of yourselves. The people of Gaza and Jerusalem are resisting, and you are trying to silence them.”
Dozens of soldiers in armored vehicles surrounded and invaded Kobar, near Ramallah, in the hours following this incident. Protests broke out in the village, and some teens threw stones at the invading soldiers.
The troops invaded Mohammad’s home, surrounding it and demanding that the family leave.
Over the one hundred days that preceded this attack, Palestinians in Gaza engaged in largely non-violent protests on a weekly basis in Gaza as part of the ‘Great March of Return’, calling for a return of the Palestinian refugees to their homes in what is now Israel, and an end to the siege on Gaza that has strangled the economy of the tiny coastal strip since 2007.
Israeli forces killed nearly 150 Palestinian demonstrators during this time, and wounded more than 17,000, many with live ammunition. One Israeli was killed in this time period, in May, by a stone slab that fell on him from a building in a Palestinian town he was invading in the West Bank. The Palestinian resistance in Gaza mainly held its fire in solidarity with the non-violent demonstrators, but the Friday before this stabbing took place, a firefight broke out and an Israeli soldier and four Palestinian fighters were killed.
Yotam was from the settlement of Adam, located in the West Bank. Source: IMEMC
July 20, 2018: Aviv Levi, 20, a Staff Sergeant with the Israeli Army, was killed by sniper fire from Gaza. He was the first soldier to be killed by Palestinian fire since Israel’s offensive and major deadly assault in Gaza in 2014.
March 18, 2018: Adiel Coleman, 32, was stabbed in the chest in Jerusalem’s Old City and succumbed to his wounds later the same day.
March 16, 2018: Netanel Kahalani, 20, was killed when an automobile collided with him and another soldier who were standing at a military roadblock in Barta’a village in the northern part of the occupied West Bank.
