Armed Israeli Citizens Shoot and Kill Terrorist After Deadly Truck Ramming Attack

Israel is currently fighting a seven-front war. While being attacked by countries such as Lebanon, Yemen, Syria and Iraq, they’re all client states of the mullahs in Iran who have pledged to erase Israel from the map. After the Islamic republic launched hundreds of ballistic missiles at Israel on October 1, Israel attacked military targets in Iran over the weekend.

But not all threats come from outside the country. Yesterday, an Israeli man driving a truck rammed it into a crowded bus stop near a military base in Tel Aviv, killing one and injuring more than 30. Hamas has taken credit for the attack.

From the Times of Israel . . .

Hebrew media outlets named the perpetrator Rami Nasrallah, an Arab Israeli driver from Qalansawe in central Israel. His body was sent to the Abu Kabir Forensic Institute for an autopsy to check if he suffered a medical condition that caused the accident, the reports said.

According to the police’s initial probe, a bus had stopped at the station outside the base to drop off passengers, and then a truck rammed into the stop, hitting the people there.

Many of the injured were senior citizens who had disembarked from the bus ahead of a day trip to a nearby museum to mark the national memorial day for those killed in the October 7, 2023, Hamas massacre and subsequent war.

Once the truck had stopped, the attacker tried to do still more damage.

A large police force was converging on the scene, and it was reported that authorities believe it was a terror attack. According to initial reports, the driver exited the truck outside a sensitive security base in Glilot with a knife and was shot by armed bystanders.

Armed bystanders. That’s something that the government has worked hard to promote and expand in the year since the October 7 Hamas attack. Hundreds of thousands of Israelis have applied for permits and are now carrying firearms on a daily basis, a change from what the the predominant, pre 10/7 mindset.

For years, we have suffered regular episodes in which Palestinian men go berserk in public places with knives or guns, killing people until they themselves are shot and killed by security forces or an armed civilian. (The most recent instance occurred last week, when a Palestinian stabbed three people at a mall.) But this never translated into gun ownership, certainly not among people I know. We seemed to expect someone else to be on hand to protect us.

No longer.

In Israel, guns are less a matter of personal liberty, as in America, than of communal defense—which is logical, I suppose, in a country whose ethos was forged not by frontier individualists but by socialist kibbutzniks. I recently attended a training session for new gun owners from central Israel, one of whom was Doron Ben-Avraham, 60, from the town of El’ad. This town was the scene of a gruesome axe attack by two Palestinians in May 2022, and one of the three people killed was someone he knew. “If I see a neighbor getting attacked, I want to be able to help—I’ll feel sick if I didn’t,” Ben-Avraham said, reflecting what seemed to be the approach of the twenty men in the class. He applied for a gun permit after October 7 and was now the new owner of a Glock-19. 

As bad as the weekend’s bus attack was, it could have been even worse, but for the willingness and ability of armed citizens to stop a murderous terrorist.