Arab rioter in Jerusalem (file)
Arab rioter in Jerusalem (file)STR/Flash 90

Even as the Knesset debates heightening security in Jerusalem amid a wave of Arab violence in recent months, and after a lethal Hamas terror attack in the city last Wednesday, a family with seven children became the latest terror victims on Monday.

The family car, driven by a couple with their seven children aged from six months to ten years old, came in for a hail of rocks by Arab assailants on Monday morning.

The attack came as the car drove on Salah e-Din Street near the Jerusalem District Court in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood north of the Old City, not far from Hebrew University's Mount Scopus Campus.

Fortunately the young family emerged unscathed from the onslaught, but their car suffered damage from the rain of rocks. Police have launched an investigation and are scouring the area for the perpetrators of the attack.

The attack Monday is just the latest in an ongoing wave of attacks dubbed the "silent intifada" by residents, that only recently has started gaining major media attention after a Hamas terrorist rammed his car into a group of people in Jerusalem last Wednesday, killing a three-month-old baby and a 22-year-old woman.

It is not the first such attack against Jewish motorists by any means.

Two Jews were targeted last Tuesday between the northern neighborhoods of Atarot and Shuafat, with Arab rioters coming right up to their car to identify them as Jews before launching a volley of rocks from point blank range.

The Monday before that, the police call center saved a Jewish family that accidentally drove into Ramallah, just north of Jerusalem, where two IDF soldiers were brutally beaten to death by a lynch-mob in 2000.

A car filled with women and children earlier this month also escaped an Arab mob in the Jerusalem neighborhood of A-Tur, after last month a family took a wrong-turn into Jerusalem's eastern Wadi Joz neighborhood and just barely escaped from an Arab ambush.

As part of measures to end the violence, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu is pushing for much harsher sentences - up to 20 years in some cases - to be leveled against rock-throwers.