In Anata, a village north of Jerusalem, a joint operation of the Israel Defense Forces and the Israel Police was conducted on yesterday to arrest Palestinians likely to be connected to terrorist activity.

Anata, like the Shoafat refugee camp, where the terrorist who mowed down pedestrians with his car last week lived, is in a sort of no man’s land. The village is cut off from Jerusalem by the security barrier, but is located in a region where neither the police nor the IDF operate much. As a result, violent criminal activity flourishes, and sometimes it evolves into terror attacks.

During yesterday’s operation, an undercover Jerusalem district police force surprised two suspects while they were meeting. One suspect tried to flee, but the cops were able to seize him. The other pulled out a pistol, but the police didn’t lose their cool. They pointed their weapons at him and in the end he dropped the gun and surrendered.

This incident in Anata, coming less than 48 hours after the police shooting in Kafr Kana, proves that the results of such confrontations are very dependent on the conduct of the policemen and soldiers involved. When viewing the security video from Kafr Kana one gets the impression that the shots were fired in contravention of open-fire regulations. Hamadan indeed threatened the policemen when he rushed at their patrol car with an object that looks like a knife, but he was shot when he had already turned his back and had moved away from the car. It isn’t clear if the policemen fired in the air, as the police officers claimed. Nor is it clear why the policeman didn’t aim at the perpetrator’s legs to neutralize him, rather than at his upper body.

Read the article in full at Haaretz.