On Sunday afternoon, a soldier and resident of Ramat Gan, a Tel Aviv suburb, got off a bus in Ramat Gan and headed for home on furlough. Eyewitnesses say an Arab got off immediately after him and began stabbing the 20-year-old soldier in the throat.

As the soldier ran, bleeding, for a few yards toward the neighborhood kiosk, the stabber ran toward the nearby yards and disappeared.

When the kiosk owner observed the soldier, he immediately recognized him. He quickly called the soldier’s mother, who came running and calmed her son until the arrival of the ambulance.

“Calm down, everything is going to be all right,” the mother reassured her son.

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Shalom Barda, who drove the bus the soldier and the stabber had traveled in, did not notice anything out of the ordinary at first, until he began to hear the shouts on the street.

“The soldier ran quietly, without saying a thing. You could see that he was in shock,” Mr. Barda said. “The stabber ran in the opposite direction, entered the yards and disappeared.” Another eyewitness who was at the spot added: “The soldier was in shock and mumbled over and over: ‘An Arab stabbed me, an Arab stabbed me.’ ”

Hillel Hoenig, the paramedic who treated the soldier, said he had described the stabbing to him and said the stabber came up from behind and injured him with a knife.

“When I got there, I saw the soldier with a cut throat, bleeding.” The [soldier’s] friends who heard about the incident suspected that it was their friend and tried to call him several times. “When we saw that he wasn’t answering anybody, we knew it was him, and ran to the hospital,” related one of the friends.

The soldier was evacuated to Tel Aviv’s Ichilov Hospital in a fully conscious state.

Several dozen police officers began to comb the area in search of the escaped stabber, who has not yet been caught. They went into every shelter and warehouse, opened up dumpsters and tried to locate the stabber using the following description: “A curly-haired Arab dressed in a blue shirt and black or blue pants.”

The police forces were also joined by many civilians, who wished to help in the search and a police helicopter was launched in an attempt to track down the stabber.

Dr. Pinhas Halperin, director of the Emergency Medicine Unit at Ichilov Hospital in Tel Aviv, said yesterday the soldier’s condition was good.

“He sustained light to moderate injuries, and his life is not in immediate danger. Sometimes there are injuries that are revealed a few hours later, and therefore he will remain under supervision tonight,” said Dr. Halperin.

David Bedein can be reached at dbedein@israelbehindthenews.com

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David Bedein
David Bedein is an MSW community organizer and an investigative journalist.   In 1987, Bedein established the Israel Resource News Agency at Beit Agron to accompany foreign journalists in their coverage of Israel, to balance the media lobbies established by the PLO and their allies.   Mr. Bedein has reported for news outlets such as CNN Radio, Makor Rishon, Philadelphia Inquirer, Los Angeles Times, BBC and The Jerusalem Post, For four years, Mr. Bedein acted as the Middle East correspondent for The Philadelphia Bulletin, writing 1,062 articles until the newspaper ceased operation in 2010. Bedein has covered breaking Middle East negotiations in Oslo, Ottawa, Shepherdstown, The Wye Plantation, Annapolis, Geneva, Nicosia, Washington, D.C., London, Bonn, and Vienna. Bedein has overseen investigative studies of the Palestinian Authority, the Expulsion Process from Gush Katif and Samaria, The Peres Center for Peace, Peace Now, The International Center for Economic Cooperation of Yossi Beilin, the ISM, Adalah, and the New Israel Fund.   Since 2005, Bedein has also served as Director of the Center for Near East Policy Research.   A focus of the center's investigations is The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA). In that context, Bedein authored Roadblock to Peace: How the UN Perpetuates the Arab-Israeli Conflict - UNRWA Policies Reconsidered, which caps Bedein's 28 years of investigations of UNRWA. The Center for Near East Policy Research has been instrumental in reaching elected officials, decision makers and journalists, commissioning studies, reports, news stories and films. In 2009, the center began decided to produce short movies, in addition to monographs, to film every aspect of UNRWA education in a clear and cogent fashion.   The center has so far produced seven short documentary pieces n UNRWA which have received international acclaim and recognition, showing how which UNRWA promotes anti-Semitism and incitement to violence in their education'   In sum, Bedein has pioneered The UNRWA Reform Initiative, a strategy which calls for donor nations to insist on reasonable reforms of UNRWA. Bedein and his team of experts provide timely briefings to members to legislative bodies world wide, bringing the results of his investigations to donor nations, while demanding reforms based on transparency, refugee resettlement and the demand that terrorists be removed from the UNRWA schools and UNRWA payroll.   Bedein's work can be found at: www.IsraelBehindTheNews.com and www.cfnepr.com. A new site,unrwa-monitor.com, will be launched very soon.