Three months after a ramming incident near the town of Ataret in the Binyamin region left two Jewish Israelis injured, the legal aid organization Honenu revealed that one of the two Arab passengers in the suspected vehicle is a released terrorist.
The disclosure has intensified criticism by the organization against the Israeli security establishment, after the IDF and ISA reportedly declined to classify the incident as a nationalist vehicular attack. Instead, the case was transferred to the police traffic division and investigated as a routine traffic accident.
The incident occurred during Ramadan, when a Jewish couple was riding an ATV along the roadside near Ataret. According to the victims’ testimony, an approaching Arab vehicle noticed them, accelerated, sharply veered out of its lane, crossed into the opposite lane and struck them at the side of the road.
As a result of the collision, the young woman riding on the ATV was thrown approximately seven meters into a nearby wadi and sustained serious injuries.
Despite the victims’ account, the suspects in the vehicle were not arrested. Traffic investigators reportedly collected statements from them at the scene but did not detain them for further questioning.
Following the revelation regarding one of the passengers, attorney Haim Bleicher of Honenu sent an urgent letter to Central Command chief Avi Bluth and to the commander of the Judea and Samaria Police District, demanding the immediate arrest of the two suspects and the transfer of the investigation to the ISA.
In the letter, Bleicher warned that the continued failure to arrest the suspects poses “an immediate danger to the security of Israeli civilians and security forces in the area."
He also sharply criticized the conduct of the authorities, writing, “The system's avoidance of investigating the terrorists constitutes a failure and a serious security danger. It seems that the lessons of the October 7th massacre were not learned at all and the system prefers to silence attacks even at the cost of releasing terrorists into the public."