JERUSALEM, Aug. 21 (Xinhua) -- A 29-year-old Palestinian woman from East Jerusalem was charged Monday with terrorism and attempted murder, a week and a half after she stabbed two Israeli men near Jerusalem's Old City.
Fadwa Hamada, a resident of Sur Baher, a Palestinian neighborhood of East Jerusalem, lightly injured a civilian and a security guard near the Old City's Damascus Gate on August 12 at noon, according to her indictment.
She was caught and arrested without being shot.
According to the indictment, submitted to the Jerusalem District courts by the State Attorney's Office, Hamada sought killing an Israeli and become a "shahida," or a martyr.
On the morning of the attack, she told her husband that she does not feels well and want to see a doctor. He called her a cab. She took with her a 12-centimeter-long kitchen knife stashed in her bag and told the driver to drop her near the Damascus Gate, a flashpoint site between the Israeli-annexed East Jerusalem and Jerusalem.
She noticed an ultra-Orthodox Jewish man walking there and tried to stab him several times, lightly wounding him in his hand before he managed to flee and the defendant began chasing him.
Her purse fell down and she stopped to pick it up. She then ran towards a security guard of the light rail, trying to stab him in his head. The guard protected his head with his hands, where the assailant inflicted two deep cuts.
The guard pulled out his gun at her, calling her to stop. Civilian passersby caught her, forcing her to drop her knife and shouting at the guard not to shoot her.
She was arrested without being shot.
It was a rare case of Palestinian assailant being arrested without being shot or killed by Israeli forces.
The incident was the latest in a wave of violence that has claimed the lives of at least 293 Palestinians, 48 Jewish Israelis, two U.S. nationals, a British tourist, and two African asylum seekers since September 2015.
Israel accuses the Palestinian National Authority of "inciting" the unrest. The Palestinians say it is the result of 50 years of Israeli occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, home to more than 5 million Palestinians.
