“Almost immediately we were surrounded by a mob that smashed a window and tried to hurt us. It was a true lynching. The only thing I could do was to scream until we were rescued,” recounted an Israeli soldier who was saved on Feb. 12 from an attempted lynching in the West Bank city of Jenin. The soldier was in a military vehicle that took a wrong turn and found herself, along with a male soldier, in the Palestinian town. A crowd of Palestinians surrounded the car, banged on it, pulled the two soldiers out and stole one of their weapons. A video filmed by one of the Palestinians shows the female soldier looking terrified, her face bleeding from cuts caused by the smashed window glass. Were it not for the intervention of Palestinian security forces, the incident could have ended a lot worse.

"The incident was potentially very dangerous and it ended the way it did only due to the conduct of the Palestinian police and the coordination with the Israeli civil administration," an Israeli military source told News 2 Channel. A Palestinian security source told the Ynet news site, “Israel must understand that though we are indeed committed to agreements [with Israel], and though we act upon them and intervene in such cases, we are not Israel’s new South Lebanon Army [SLA]. This won’t happen." The speaker referred to the Christian-controlled SLA militia that operated on Israel’s behalf in southern Lebanon until the Israeli withdrawal from there in 2000.

The attack on the Israeli military vehicle followed a series of raids on the Jenin refugee camp by Israeli troops searching for Ahmed Jarrar, who led the terror cell that murdered Rabbi Raziel Shevach from the Israeli West Bank settlement of Havat Gilad on Jan. 9. During these nighttime operations, Israel Defense Forces (IDF) and Border Police troops clashed with residents of the camp. While the violence served as the backdrop to the attempted mob lynching, it was by no means the only cause. Tensions have been running high in other parts of the West Bank, too, generating a sense of an impending explosion.

During one of the IDF’s operations in Jenin, on Feb. 3, a Tel Aviv resident accidentally entered the Palestinian village of Abu Dis, east of Jerusalem. Palestinian policemen extricated him safely, only after hundreds of the neighborhood residents surrounded his car, dragged him out, pelted him with stones and set his vehicle on fire. In fact, Israeli soldiers at a nearby roadblock spotted his vehicle, realized he was in danger and sounded the alarm. They contacted the Palestinian police, and so the Israeli citizen was saved from the angry mob.