ANOTHER TERRORIST ATTACK NEAR RIMONIM

No sooner does one terrorist attack take place, it leads to another:

Palestinian Authority terrorist groups are scrambling to claim credit for a second attack that left a Jewish man and woman, both in their 30s, wounded on a road north of Jerusalem late Wednesday night.

Rabbi Moshe and Shira Moreno, residents of the Jordan Rift Valley, were treated on the scene by Magen David Adom medics before being rushed to Hadassah Ein Kerem Medical Center in Jerusalem. Moreno was moderately wounded, and suffered leg injuries; his wife sustained lighter wounds as a result of the vehicle overturning.

Terrorists peppered their car with bullets in a drive-by shooting on Route 60 between the Rimonim Junction and the Jewish community of Kochav HaShachar in the Binyamin region of Samaria, just about 15 minutes north of the capital, at about 11:00 p.m. The vehicle overturned, tumbled down an incline and landed in a ditch.

[...]

Fatah Renegades, Hamas Compete for Credit

A Fatah cell calling itself the Al-Namir cells of the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades claimed responsibility for the attack in a call late Wednesday night to the offices of WorldNetDaily. The group issued a statement promising the attack was “part of a series of more attacks to come.”

According to journalist Aaron Klein, highly placed sources in both Fatah and its affiliate group, the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, Al-Namir is a renegade Fatah group that opposes the opening of talks with Israel.

The sources denied the group was coordinating its movements with the political leadership of Fatah and the PA, adding that it had planned and carried out Wednesday night’s attack with Hamas and the Islamic Jihad terror group.

By Thursday morning, Hamas had also claimed responsibility for the attack.

Reading this, I have even more reason to wonder if Hamas is trying to take away heat from Fatah's side deliberately, so they won't have to shoulder responsibility in Washington. But what remains clear is that Israel's government cannot allow borders to be erected that cripple the army/police's ability to effectively track the culprits.

On a side note, as Michael Freund says in the Jerusalem Post, it's time to turn the ignition key in the bulldozers and build/develop the Jewish neighborhoods again, because they help disabuse the Arabs of the notion that Israel is a temporary phenomenon.

Update: and let's also note that Shas is against a building freeze:

"Shas is opposed to freezing building throughout Eretz Yisrael," Yishai said, reportedly before the two attacks on Israelis in the West Bank. Yishai added that Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, Shas's spiritual leader, opposed the building freeze from its beginning, and his opinion has not changed.

That's why they must make this clear to the PM when he comes back, too.

Update 2: remaining consistent with their usual MO, the NY Times has blamed the victims and called Hamas an "Islamic group" (Hat tip: The American Thinker).