Israeli Student Stabbed to Death, Manhunt Underway

Stand for Israel | August 8, 2019

ISRAEL-PALESTINIAN-CONFLICT — Palestinians look on as Israeli soldiers take part in a house-to-house search operation in the West Bank village of Beit Fajjar near Bethlehem on August 8, 2019, following a stabbing attack. - An off-duty Israeli soldier was found dead with stab wounds near a Jewish settlement in the occupied West Bank today in what Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called a "terrorist" attack, sparking a manhunt. Details were still emerging of the killing, but it risked raising Israeli-Palestinian tensions weeks ahead of September 17 Israeli polls. (Photo by HAZEM BADER / AFP) (Photo credit should read HAZEM BADER/AFP/Getty Images)

Terror again struck the Holy Land this week after the body of an off-duty IDF soldier and yeshiva student was found south of Jerusalem. The Times of Israel’s Judah Ari Gross reports on this terror attack and the extensive IDF manhunt underway for the young man’s killer:

The body of a yeshiva student who had been stabbed to death was discovered outside a settlement in the Gush Etzion area of the West Bank in the predawn hours of Thursday morning, prompting a massive manhunt for the killer.
The victim, who was later identified Dvir Sorek of the Ofra settlement, was studying at the Machanayim religious seminary in the Migdal Oz settlement, and had joined the military while continuing his studies, in a program known in Hebrew as hesder. Though formally a soldier, he was unarmed and not in uniform at the time of the attack, nor had he undergone military training…
“He went to Jerusalem to buy gifts for his rabbis and on the way back there was an attack. He was found clutching the books that he’d bought,” the principal of his seminary, Rabbi Shlomo Wilk, told Army Radio.
Initial findings indicated that the off-duty soldier was not killed where his body was found, but had been abducted elsewhere, as he was walking from the nearby Gush Etzion Junction to his yeshiva, and taken away in a car. He was apparently stabbed to death after being snatched and was then left along the road just outside his yeshiva in Migdal Oz…