JERUSALEM — After a year in which no victims had been murdered in terror attacks, a 39-year-old man was murdered Wednesday in a suspected terror attack in Petah Tikva.
Rabbi Shai Ohayon was stabbed multiple times and succumbed to his injuries later the same day. The father of four was studying full-time in a kollel in Kfar Saba.
The suspect was identified by Israeli authorities as Khalil Abd al-Khaliq Dweikat, 46, Times of Israel reported. Dweikat, from the Nablus area in the West Bank, was in Israel with a legal work permit.
He is in custody of the Israeli Security Agency, known as Shin Bet. He had no history of terror activities, the Shin Bet said. The agency was investigating a possible history of mental illness.
The past 12 months had been the safest year of the past 56 for Israel. For the first time since 1964, 12 months passed without a single civilian killed in a terror attack in Israel.
The most recent Israeli citizen murdered in a terror attack was Rina Shnerb. Rina, 17, was hiking at the Danny Spring with her father and brother, when she was murdered on August 23, 2019 by Palestinian Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) terrorists who detonated a bomb killing Rina and injuring her father and brother.
A second Israeli citizen, Dvir Sorek, was killed in a terror attack earlier that month. He was murdered on August 7, 2019 near his yeshiva in Gush Etzion. He was in a hesder program that combines IDF service and yeshiva learning, although he had not yet begun the military portion of the program.
The Shin Bet, which tracks terror attacks, reports that there were 2,012 terror attacks in eleven of the past twelve months.
Of those terror attacks, 864 attacks were in the West Bank, 849 in the Gaza periphery and 299 in the rest of Israel.
The Shin Bet report includes rock attacks, stabbings, vehicle ramming attacks, arson, Molotov cocktails, explosives and shootings. Rock attacks were likely much higher than the Shin Bet numbers as many go unreported or uncounted.
Since 2015, the Shin Bet reports a significant annual increase in the number of terror attacks prevented. In 2019, 564 major terror attacks were prevented, including four kidnappings, 10 suicide bombings, 78 stabbings, 353 shootings, 105 explosive attacks, and 14 vehicle rammings.
Shai Ohayon is survived by his wife Sivan and their four children: Tohar, 13, Hillel, 11, Shiloh, nine, and Malachi, four.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and President Reuven Rivlin sent the family their condolences.
