Bolstered security at checkpoints between Israel and the West Bank last month, two days after the Sarona complex attack in Tel Aviv.
The Palestinian cousins had planned a shooting rampage on an Israeli train car; they took along knives, in case their improvised guns jammed.
But after sneaking into Israel from their homes in the occupied West Bank, the pair encountered metal detectors at a train station. So they took a taxi to Tel Aviv instead and shot diners in a popular restaurant in the upscale Sarona complex, killing four Israelis.
Shin Bet, Israel’s domestic security agency, said this week that the attack a month ago was “inspired” by the Islamic State, and that one of the assailants, Muhammad Mhamra, 21, had returned from studies in Jordan as a supporter of the extremist group. As with a growing number of lone-wolf attackers worldwide, the authorities said there was no evidence that he and his cousin Khaled, 20, had been officially recruited by the Islamic State, also called ISIS or ISIL, or had received any support from it.
Nine months into a surge of Palestinian attacks that at one point included several stabbings a day, officials and experts said that the knife violence had waned, but that there was a rise in the number of young Palestinians seeking to shoot Israelis. More than 30 Israelis and two American visitors have been killed by Palestinian attackers since Oct. 1; more than 200 Palestinians have been killed by Israelis in the same period, many while attacking or, according to the Israeli authorities, intending to do so.
“There is a growing pattern of ISIS-like operations,” said Ehud Yaari, an Israel-based fellow of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. He said young people who shunned established Palestinian groups like Hamas, Fatah or Islamic Jihad were “copying the model set in Brussels, San Bernardino and other places.”
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict has not figured prominently on the Islamic State’s agenda, as it does with Hamas, the Islamist group that controls the Gaza Strip, and the Lebanese Shiite organization Hezbollah. The attacks by Palestinians have also been less deadly and less sophisticated than the suicide bombings or gun massacres in other places.
Like the Sarona assailants, many Palestinians have set out with homemade weapons known as “Carlos,” based on the Swedish-made Carl Gustav submachine gun from the 1950s and sometimes adapted from air guns in West Bank workshops.
A June poll by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Research found that in the absence of peace talks, more than half the Palestinian public backed a return to an armed uprising. At the same time, support for stabbings had dropped, and about half of those surveyed said they thought that the current wave of violence had come to an end.
But the situation remains unpredictable. Last week, a Palestinian, Mohammad Tarayreh, 19, fatally stabbed a 13-year-old Israeli, Hallel Yaffa Ariel, in her bed in a settlement in the occupied West Bank. The next day, an Israeli father of 10, Rabbi Michael Mark, was killed in a drive-by shooting in the southern West Bank, and his wife and a daughter were wounded.
After those attacks and the Sarona shootings before them, Israel’s rightist government took unusually stern measures to crack down on broad swaths of Palestinians, which some analysts attributed to the fact that Avigdor Lieberman, an ultranationalist settler, had joined the cabinet as defense minister.
Israeli security personnel conducting a search after the Sarona complex attack in June.
BAZ RATNER / REUTERS
The Israeli military has strictly limited movement between towns and villages in the southern West Bank, including the major city of Hebron, a measure likely to remain in place until the gunmen who killed Rabbi Mark are apprehended. Israel also said it would immediately deduct from the tax revenues it collects on behalf of the Palestinian Authority an unspecified amount equivalent to what the authority pays in stipends to the families of people who carry out terrorist acts.
Earlier, after Sarona, Israel canceled over 80,000 special travel permits allowing Palestinians to visit Israel during the holy month of Ramadan.
But the security apparatus is still struggling to contain a steady trickle of an uprising in which the profiles and motives of the assailants defy simple definition. They have included schoolchildren as young as 12, jobless young people and professionals: Shin Bet recently announced the arrest of a dentist in his mid-30s in the May detonation of an explosive device that seriously wounded an Israeli officer.
Some of the Palestinian attackers have acted out of nationalistic or religious motivations, frustrated by the impositions of an Israeli occupation now in its 50th year and with no end in sight. Others have had troubled personal lives and seemed to be essentially committing suicide by pulling out weapons in front of soldiers. Still others posted on social media that they were seeking to avenge the deaths of relatives, friends or unknown assailants who went before them. Palestinian officials and human rights groups have accused Israeli forces of using excessive force and in some cases carrying out extrajudicial killings.
Many of the attacks unfolded at the Gush Etzion Junction, a busy intersection amid the stretch of settlements and Palestinian villages south of Jerusalem. One recent day, a senior Israeli officer stood at the now-calmer junction and explained that the military had recovered from the initial surprise and was employing new tools that helped suppress the surge of stabbings.
The officer, who spoke on the condition of anonymity under army rules, said the idea was to stop potential assailants before they even set out. The military traced the sources of violence to particular villages or clans, carried out arrests, searched houses and focused on social media, rounding up dozens of Palestinians suspected of spreading incitement on the internet.
Ghassan Khatib, vice president of Birzeit University in the West Bank, said the Palestinian Authority had also taken pre-emptive steps, like sending security forces into creches and schools to search for weapons . While the Palestinian leadership did not dare go against the popular support for the stabbings at the start, he added, it has gradually begun to try to tamp down the violent stirrings in media messaging as the public mood changed.
“People felt that this was not an effective thing and not a wise thing,” Mr. Khatib said. “Those teenagers were being lost with no meaning and nothing in return.”
Mr. Khatib said he thought that the military’s targeted approach to containment had contributed to the decrease in attacks, but he worried that the crackdown on the broader community by the government could backfire. He also rejected comparisons with the Islamic State, saying that Palestinians were more inspired by things like settler violence and that Israel was “always trying to link the Palestinians with the evil in the world.”
According to the indictment filed this week against the Sarona killers in a Tel Aviv court, the cousins photographed themselves with an Islamic State flag before setting out. The indictment said the pair wanted to avenge the arson, attributed to Jewish extremists, that killed a Palestinian toddler and his parents last year in the village of Duma.
The Sarona attack was at once planned and unplanned. The killers plotted for months, bringing dark suits, watches, leather bags, new shoes and sunglasses to pose as businessmen who might be riding the train. They also bought rat poison for dipping their knives in, though they did not end up using it.
When the train idea fell through and they arrived in Tel Aviv, they asked passers-by where they could find an area with cafes and restaurants and followed their directions to Sarona.
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