Palestinian-Israeli violence leaves both sides fearful

In another sort of world, these two boys might have been friends: a pair of 13-year-olds living not far from each other in a modern-day biblical landscape, each described by others as sometimes seeming endearingly young for his age.

Now both boys are hospitalized, and each in his own way has become an emblem of a larger battle raging around him. In Jerusalem, these are the days of the knives: This month has brought a series of stabbing attacks by Palestinians, with an answering Israeli security crackdown. Taken together, the nearly daily assaults have set an already tightly wound city on nearly unbearable edge.

The lives of the two youngsters became violently intertwined Monday when Naor, the Jewish middle-school student, was stabbed and gravely injured as he bicycled away from a sweets store in Pisgat Zeev. The Jerusalem “satellite” neighborhood was built on land outside Israel’s 1967 borders, on land the Palestinians consider theirs.

“It was a shocking sight,” said shopkeeper Assi Gabai, a close friend of Naor’s father who heard screams and ran to try to help. Speaking to Israel’s Channel Two shortly after the attack, he described Naor’s entreaty: “Save me!”

Seconds later, the boy — whose full name has not been released by his family — lost consciousness.

The other 13-year-old, Ahmed Manasra, was one of the two knife-wielding Palestinian attackers, according to police and witnesses. He and his cousin Hassan Manasra, 15, lived in the poorer, rougher Arab neighborhood of Beit Hanina, only a few minutes’ walk from the site of the assault.

The Manasra family insists Ahmed and Hassan, who live in the same large hillside compound, went to Pisgat Zeev only to buy CDs, as they often did. “He’s just an ordinary boy,” said Ahmed’s worn-looking father, Saleh, a grocer. “He likes to watch cartoons, the kind you would expect a littler kid would like.”

Not surprisingly in this multimedia age, competing video narratives of the attack and its aftermath quickly surfaced — with Israel and the Palestinians each pointing to what they called proof of the other side’s cynical desire to exploit bloody events.

As onlookers scrambled to halt the attack on Naor and police rushed to the scene, Hassan was killed and Ahmed was injured, authorities and witnesses said. Video shows Ahmed crumpled on the ground, a pool of blood beneath him, with a surrounding crowd screaming obscenities at him as he weakly tries to lift his head.

The images went viral on Palestinian social media, with the boy in question described as having been “martyred,” or killed. On Wednesday night, despite Israeli government statements describing Ahmed as alive and being cared for in an Israeli hospital, the claim of his death was repeated by Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas.

“We will not succumb to … the execution of our children in cold blood, as they have done with the child Ahmed Manasra and other children in Jerusalem and elsewhere,” Abbas said in a televised address.

Israeli officials responded with outrage, and on Thursday released images of Ahmed sitting up in his hospital bed, head bandaged, being fed what looked like broth. Late Thursday, the Israeli websites Walla and Ynet, citing security sources, said the boy had confessed to police investigators that his elder cousin had procured knives to “stab Jews,” and that the younger cousin had agreed to go with him to Pisgat Zeev.

Reports about Naor have been more muted, largely out of concern for the family’s privacy and the gravity of the minor’s condition. Cameras caught his mother fainting at the hospital when she learned of the extent of his injuries, and prayerful wishes from devoutly observant Jews have flooded in, but the family has made no public statement.

“A lovely boy,” said Gabai, the shopkeeper who tried to help him. One poignant image that did appear in Israeli newspapers: the boy’s bike, fallen to the ground after the stabbing.

Jerusalem Mayor Nir Barkat visited Naor’s school, and teams of psychologists were called in to counsel his classmates. Sometimes it’s good to be afraid, the mayor told the youngsters: It makes you more careful.

Two days after the attack in Pisgat Zeev, which also injured a Jewish man in his 20s, Israeli police released surveillance images that showed part of the assault. It showed two boys who appeared to be Ahmed and Hassan, knives in hand, running down the street in pursuit of their initial quarry, who was wounded but managed to escape.

In other images, Naor can be seen in the sweets store, where witnesses said he looked at toys and games. As he prepares to leave, he appears to check his phone. The attack takes place at the very top of the video frame, where indistinct figures approach him and the flickering shape of the falling bicycle is visible.

Confronted with the terrifyingly intimate nature of the recent attacks, Israelis are infuriated by any accusation, including a suggestion Wednesday by U.S. State Department spokesman John Kirby, that stabbings, known as “knife-terror,” have been countered with excessive force. Palestinians, though, have described the outcome of many attacks — assailants or would-be ones being shot dead on the spot, as two more were on Wednesday — as summary executions.

The involvement of so many young Palestinians in the attacks has been much noted, particularly in the case of Ahmed, the youngest of a crop of attackers who are usually in their later teens or early 20s.

“It is so easy to manipulate a child, particularly with social media,” Yitzhak Kadman, who leads Israel’s National Council for the Child, told Israel Radio. “It is so easy to poison children, seduce them with promises and send them out onto the front lines.”

In the meantime, the two sides are fearful of each other. Israelis are emptying stores of pepper spray, gazing over their shoulders, not lingering in public places when they can help it. And young Palestinian men and boys, aware they fit the attacker profile, say they are frightened of being mistaken by the authorities for an assailant.

“When I see police, I just freeze,” said Omar Abu Daoud, 20, who lives in Jerusalem’s Arab neighborhood of Jabal Mukaber, where several attackers have come from. “I try not to move suddenly. I try not to put my hand in my pocket. I try not to take my hand out of my pocket.”

Shira Levine, shopping in the main mall in Pisgat Zeev, where bags and parcels are searched by a guard at the barricaded entrance, said she came out only to buy a birthday present for her little niece. She was looking at ruffled pink dresses.

“Then I’m going straight home again,” she said.

Special correspondent Batsheva Sobelman contributed to this report.

Twitter: @laurakingLAT