Residents of the Shomron community of Havat Gilad were able to thwart on Monday a late night attempt by Palestinian Authority Arabs to steal a large flock of sheep.
As the Arab thieves attempted to steal the sheep, they activated an alarm which woke up the local security officer as well as the owner of the flock. The two arrived on the scene and the Arabs ran away.
“The thieves came at 2:30 in the morning,” the flock owner, Netanel Bodner, told Arutz Sheva in an interview on Wednesday.
“When I arrived I saw all the sheep roaming around outside. We put them back in the pen and counted them one by one,” he added, noting that police detectives who were called to the scene found a trail of footprints going down towards the wadi and to the nearby Arab village.
Bodner said he is convinced that only deterrence will keep the thieves away from the community. “We have lived here for ten years and for a long time there was no theft here. Havat Gilad has no fence because there is deterrence and the Arabs know not to mess with the Jews from Havat Gilad,” he added.
He said that after the attempted theft, he went down to the nearby Arab village of Jit where he found the truck onto which the thieves had planned to load the stolen sheep.
Bodner said that the fact that Arabs are allowed to harvest olives in Havat Gilad during the fall season allows them to study the area and plan terror attacks, reminding how the Arabs who murdered five members of the Fogel family in Itamar planned the murders when they were allowed into the community for the olive harvest.
“It’s been almost two years since the attack on the Fogel family in Itamar,” he said. “Every year during Sukkot they let dozens of Arabs, accompanied by soldiers and police officers, to pick olives under our homes, and that’s how they study the community.”
Bodner added, "I was not surprised that they knew how to break into the sheep pen. The same thing happened with the Fogel family. The Arabs come to harvest olives and then the same Arabs come back to attack.”
Arabs regularly take advantage of the annual olive harvest to carry out attacks against Jews in Judea and Samaria.