A teenage Israeli soldier shot dead four people in a blazing row over the country’s imminent withdrawal from Gaza before being lynched by furious residents of an Arab-Israeli town.
The shooting, the first deadly incident connected to Israel’s controversial plan to uproot all troops and settlers from Gaza and parts of the northern West Bank, heightened fears about possible violence during the historic pullout.
The 19-year-old religiously observant Jew, dressed in army fatigues, unleashed a volley of fire inside a bus in the northern Galilee town of Shfaram in an argument over the pullout, police said.
Four Israeli Arab passengers died in the hail of bullets. The gunman was lynched by a furious crowd as hundreds flocked to the blood-smeared bus in a Druze neighbourhood of Shfaram shortly after the attack, police and witnesses said.
Israel has three strageic options. They can pull out of Gaza and (most of) the West Bank, expell every Arab from those lands, or become an apartheid state. As this story shows, even the least bad of the three options is still… well, nothing better than “the least bad.”
And things will get worse before they get better.
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