Monday’s car-ramming attack in Jerusalem returned Palestinian terror to the headlines.

The near-daily stabbing or car-ramming attempts – sometimes two or three in one day after a few days’ lull – had lately begun to receive no more than terse, factual news coverage, reminiscent of the daily reports on other types of crime, or even road accidents. By now, an incident that ends with a wounded Israeli and a dead Palestinian terrorist, especially if it happens in the West Bank, is viewed as almost routine. But Monday’s attack, with 14 people wounded, including a seriously wounded baby, just a few minutes’ drive from the capital’s television studios, received very different coverage.

Yet even if the media’s response is different, all these attacks resemble each other. It’s been two and a half months since the attack that the army defines as the start of the current violence, the murder of Eitam and Naama Henkin near Nablus, but the security services still haven’t figured out how to cope with a lone Palestinian terrorist.

Even more systematic monitoring of posts on social media networks has produced at most a few warnings about the possibility of attacks. When the interval between a decision to attack and its implementation is sometimes a mere half hour, according to the testimony of several assailants who were arrested, it’s very hard to provide hermetic protection.

Read the article in full at Haaretz.