Photo: Flash90

Within three hours of a brutal terror attack on 19-year-old Ori Ansbacher in a Jerusalem forest, Israeli authorities had identified her killer, a Palestinian from Hebron.

The Shin Bet immediately launched a search, but as the minutes passed and chances of finding the terrorist diminished, the security service took more drastic auction, activating both human and electronic intelligence systems in order to find him. By Friday, hours after the murder on Thursday, the Yamam special police unit had tracked him to a mosque in Ramallah where he was hiding. The Yamam unit entered the mosque to capture the suspect, 29-year-old Arafat Arafiyeh, but retreated once a riot broke out.

The Yamam tracked the terrorist to a nearby abandoned building, at which point Binyamin Netanyahu, who is also acting defense minister, approved the operation to capture him. Within three minutes, he was in police hands, still holding the knife he had used to carry out his gruesome act.

Arafiyeh was a familiar figure to Israeli authorities. In March 2017, after being caught with a knife at the entrance to Har Habayis, he told police that he wanted to die carrying out a terror attack. “I’ll do it again,” he said at the time. “I will buy another knife and I’ll come here again to get into jail or become a shahid.” He was sentenced to six months in prison and released after five. He had also been jailed in 2009.

Since the murder, Prime Minister Netanyahu has vowed to implement a recently passed law that withholds funds from the Palestinian Authority as long as it continues to provide rewards in the forms of stipends to Palestinians who carry out terror attacks.  Last year, the Palestinian Authority distributed $183 million to terrorists and their families, according to the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs.

Sources in the defense agencies say they have discerned in recent weeks an effort by Hamas to dispatch “lone wolf” terrorists back onto Israel’s streets, as during the years 2015 and 2016. As part of these efforts, Hamas agents are offering poor families large sums of money to incentivize their sons to carry out attacks. As a result, Israel demanded that Qatar, which has provided Hamas with $1 billion since 2012, distribute its money directly to poor families in Gaza and not to the Hamas government. Qatar refused at first, but after another Arab state intervened, Qatar did as Israel asked.

Days after her murder, colleagues at the at-risk youth center where Ansbacher worked found a poem she recently wrote. According to the Israeli Kan news site, Ansbacher would walk into the Ein Yael woods near the center to write her poetry. The poem reads in part: “Make it so your world will be a world of peace. Remember the maiden you are, the honey you had before they descended upon you, reestablish yourself, revive the maiden and build yourself a world, a world of peace.”

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 748)