Two Israeli Soldiers Killed in the Hebron Shooting Attack

Two Israeli soldiers went to work on Friday morning checking cars at a roadblock outside Hebron, and before the sun was properly up both of them were dead. By the end of that same day, four foreign ministers sitting together in Istanbul had issued a joint statement announcing that the main source of instability in the Middle East is Israel.

IDF Chief of Staff Eyal Zamir at the scene of the terror attack (IDF Spokesperson)

The soldiers were Staff Sgt. Ron Yonatan Roytman, twenty three, from Ashkelon, a squad commander, and Sgt. Yuval Shai Svilem, twenty, from Hod Hasharon. They served in a search and rescue battalion, which is worth sitting with for a second, because that is the part of the army that pulls people out of collapsed buildings. Three more soldiers were wounded. Two Palestinian gunmen, both twenty seven and from the same Hebron family, pulled up in a car, got out on a side street with an assault rifle and a pistol, and started firing from behind buildings at young men who were standing in the open looking at license plates. It took officers more than twenty minutes of fighting to kill them.

The army found a large quantity of ammunition in the attackers' car. The assessment is that these two were trying to reach a main highway to carry out a mass shooting on civilians, could not get there, and settled for the soldiers at the checkpoint instead. Hamas, which has deep roots in Hebron, called the attack heroic without formally claiming it, which is the arrangement that lets everyone keep their deniability while the praise still reaches the next recruit.

So that was Friday in the West Bank. And in Istanbul, the foreign ministers of Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Egypt and Pakistan agreed that Israeli occupation is the main source of instability in the region and beyond, and that Israeli policy has deepened global perceptions of injustice. The same statement condemned the Houthis for firing at Saudi civilians, demanded that shipping lanes be reopened, and asked for quiet diplomacy with Iran. On that very day, a Houthi ballistic missile was intercepted on its way to Riyadh.

Why did the Hebron shooting attack happen at a checkpoint?

Because that is what a checkpoint is for. It is not scenery and it is not a political gesture. It is a slow, irritating, deeply unpopular filter that sits between a man with a rifle and a road full of families, and on Friday morning it worked exactly as designed. Two gunmen with enough ammunition for a massacre ran into soldiers before they reached the highway, and the people who would have been on that highway went home for Shabbat without ever knowing how close they came.

Nobody in Israel enjoys this arrangement. Israeli soldiers don't enjoy manning them too. Anyone who tells you otherwise has never stood at one in an Israeli summer. But the demand that arrives from Istanbul and from European capitals and from the opinion pages is always that Israel loosen the filter, reduce the friction, restore freedom of movement, and trust the arrangement that follows. And the people making that demand are never the ones whose children drive on Route 35.

Israel is not holding roadblocks in the hills of Judea because it enjoys the paperwork. It is holding them because the alternative was tried, and the alternative is the reason there is an army base near Hebron at all. Within one news cycle the story stopped being about two dead Israelis and became a story about Israeli overreaction. The headlines moved to the closure of the city, to the measuring of the attackers' homes for demolition, to the word collective punishment, to the accusation that the prime minister was using the attack for advantage days before an election. You can read entire reports in which the two soldiers appear once, low down, in a subordinate clause, and in which the ammunition in that car does not appear at all. The dead became context for the real story, which was Israel's response to them. That is not a reporting failure anymore. After this many years it is a format.

Israeli checkpoint near to Hebron. Soldiers are checking Palestinian's cars entering that main city. Specially during riots time. (Shutterstock)

What happens next in the West Bank after the Hebron shooting attack?

Israel has sealed Hebron and the nearby town of Halhul, launched a counterterrorism operation with the army, the Shin Bet, the Border Police and the Civil Administration, and signaled an intention to interrogate many dozens of suspects. The prime minister has promised something far broader across the West Bank, and has talked about going into the neighborhood the gunmen came from, emptying it of residents and moving through it house by house.

The valuable part of this operation is invisible and it is not dramatic. It is the interrogations. It is finding the lathe shop where the rifle was assembled, the man who paid for the ammunition, the courier, the WhatsApp group, the Hamas operative in the area who was quietly encouraging two cousins for months. It is demolishing the homes of the men who did this, because deterrence inside a culture that pays families for martyrdom has to touch something the family actually loses. That work ends networks. It is slow and it does not photograph well.

The part that is worth being careful about is the theater. Emptying a neighborhood in front of the cameras does not find the guns, and it hands the people who met in Istanbul the exact images they were already describing in their statement. Israel has every right to go into Hebron.

And the broader point for anyone reading this from Ohio or London is that the regional picture is being rewritten in front of you. The same four governments that now coordinate against Iranian missiles and Houthi drones, that want the sea lanes open and Tehran contained, still reach for the old formula when they need a joint paragraph everyone can sign. Israel does the hard work of keeping jihadists off highways, and then gets written into the communique as the problem. That gap between what those capitals do and what they say is where Israeli diplomacy has real room to push, and it should push.

Two families in Ashkelon and Hod Hasharon are sitting shiva this week for sons who died stopping a massacre, zichronam livracha, and the only thing the world asked of Israel in return was to make the road a little easier for the next two men with a rifle. Am Yisrael Chai.