The Knife Intifada was an escalation of violence in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict which occurred from September 2015 to June 2016. The escalation saw the deaths of 38 Israelis (31 of them civilians) and 235 Palestinians (163 of them attackers, only 10 civilians), the wounding of 558 Israelis and 3,917 Palestinians, and the arrest of 7,955 Palestinian rioters.
History[]
On 13 September 2015, Palestinian Muslim youths gathered at the al-Aqsa Mosque on Temple Mount in Jerusalem to prevent Israeli Jews from visiting the Mount on the eve of Rosh Hashanah. Israeli police were sent in to disperse the activists, who barricaded themselves inside the mosque and threw firebombs and rocks at the police, who used tear gas and rubber bullets against them. News of the Temple Mount standoff spread on social media, and, on 13 September 2015, Alexander Levlovich was murdered while driving through the Armon HaNetziv neighborhood of Jerusalem by Palestinian rioters throwing rocks. On 1 October, Hamas militants murdered Eitam and Na'ama Henkin, and a wave of Palestinian and Israeli Arab "lone wolf" attacks were carried out against Israeli civilians, with Fatah's al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades, the Islamic State, and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad praising the attacks, and President of the Palestinian Authority Mahmoud Abbas refusing to condemn any of the Palestinian attacks. In the last week of 2015, Israel deployed 91 new checkpoints and roadblocks in the West Bank to limit Palestinian movement in order to prevent attacks, and more than half of the obstacles were placed around Hebron. The Knife Intifada petered out by June 2016, and it highlighted the dangers of social media being used by terrorists to coordinate their actions.