Approximately 100 rioters from the Palestinian Authority towns of Dayr Dibwan and Ramun attacked a Jewish shepherd near the Alon Highway on Shabbat (Saturday) afternoon with rocks and clubs.
The rioters arrived in an orderly convoy and began to pelt the shepherd with rocks and attempted to hit him with clubs. The shepherd suffered a head injury and was taken by MDA medics for hospital care.
IDF forces that were called to the scene were fired on from the nearby Palestinian Authority towns, but were able to repel the rioters and arrested one of the residents of Dayr Dibwan. A few minutes after the incident began, left-wing activists arrived at the scene and attempted to interfere with the Israeli forces’ operations.
In a search of the mobile phone of the rioter who was arrested, several incriminating videos were found, including a video of himself at the beginning of the incident holding a stone and throwing it towards the shepherd in the valley below him, and another video of him shooting a sniper rifle from one of the hills in the area.
During the afternoon prayers on Friday, one of the imams of the central mosque in Ramun delivered a sermon in which he incited against Jewish farms in the area as stealing land from the town and called to conquer them as a sign of identification with the mujahedeen (jihadists) fighting in Gaza.
Immediately following the sermon, lengthy volleys of gunfire were heard in the town, causing several alerts to Israeli forces nearby. Residents of the farms commented that on Friday, they realized that due to the sermon, there would be an attack of some sort on one of the farms but did not believe it would be on the scale that occurred.
The attack that took place over Shabbat comes on the background of several similar attacks over the last few months, all targeting shepherds in the Binyamin region. The most serious of them happened 2 months ago near the town of Rimonim, where five rioters attacked two shepherds and seriously injured one of them with an ax. The shepherd was taken to hospital care unconscious, and needed to undergo extensive rehabilitation. The prosecution elected to free the attackers and did not file an indictment against them, due to the police refusal to interrogate the shepherds on suspicion of attacking the rioters.