Galilee Liberation group claims injuring two Israeli police at Jerusalem Old City Gate

The Galilee Liberation Brigades claimed the latest Palestinian terrorist attack in Jerusalem, in which a gunman shot two Israel Border Police guards at the Old City’s Lions’ Gate just before midnight on July 11 and vanished in the nearby ancient Muslim cemetery. Both, seriously hurt, returned fire but failed to stop him. One policeman took a head wound; the second was shot in the chest. The assailant apparently aware of the video camera overhead covered his face.
Police commissioner Dudi Cohen said he saw no links in the six Palestinian lone-wolf attacks in Jerusalem this year, costing 12 Israeli lives – any more than he did after a lone assailant murdered eight students at the Mercaz Harav Yeshiva last March. The police also dismiss the Hizballah-sponsored Galilee Liberation Brigades which claimed previous attacks as non-existent.
In the last outrage it claimed earlier this month, a Jerusalem Palestinian used a bulldozer to mow down cars and pedestrians on the capital’s Jaffa Street, killing three people before he was overpowered and shot dead.
Cohen admitted only that none of the assailants have been caught.
debkafile‘s counter-terror sources brings six connecting links to police attention:
1. They all occurred in Jerusalem; none anywhere else in Israel.
2. They were carried out by Palestinian residents of Jerusalem. The last assailant has not been identified, but his escape in pitch dark through the fairly wild terrain of the Kidron Valley outside the Old City’s eastern wall indicates he too was a local, who may well turn up for work with an Israeli firm next week as though nothing was amiss.
3. Some clandestine center in Jerusalem is evidently recruiting, directing, arming and guiding these solo killers to target. This center is undoubtedly under orders from a larger terrorist headquarters outside the city or even the country.
4. All the assailants were ready to confront Israeli security forces and die in action, which makes them suicide killers.
5. None of the attacks had advance warning – first, because the Shin Bet internal security service is still not on top of the Jerusalem terrorist organization operating under cover among the city’s quarter of a million Palestinian residents; and second, because police chiefs are obstructing their own inquiry by refusing to see the connections in an obvious series.
6. It started on January 24 and 26, when a border policeman was killed and three injured outside the Shoefat district in northern Jerusalem.
That attack was carried out by a lone killer who, like the Lions Gate gunman, targeted a regular Israeli police sentry contingent in a part of the city inhabited or claimed by Palestinians.
The security cameras which recorded the attack at Lions’ Gate, the main entry to Temple Mount and one of the most sensitive points in Jerusalem, should have raised the alarm at the police command and control center, but obviously did not.
Our counter-terror sources stress that the Jerusalem police must change its ways. To foil future attacks it will have to take a leaf out of the army’s proactive preventive operations on the West Bank, by varying sentry deployments, posting them in unexpected places and hiding ambush teams at potential targets. Checkpoints thrown up without warning are effective traps for terrorists.
The Olmert government must make up its mind about whether or not to demolish the homes of two known assailants, who were suicides and whose addresses are known. Deterrence is a policy; uncertainty is not.