Amichai Melamed, 20, a yeshiva student living in Hebron, walked from the Beit Hadassah neighborhood in the Jewish settlement of Hebron to the Abraham Avinu neighborhood on Saturday. Suddenly, he heard explosions but didn’t think this was the sound of an automatic rifle being fired.
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"If the terrorist had barricaded himself and aimed his fire at me, it could have turned into a massacre," Melamed recounted a day after an attempted shooting attack in Hebron, which ended with the terrorist being eliminated by security forces.
The terrorist, Sheikh Mahmoud Nofal, was an imam of the Al-Qasim Mosque in Hebron and a Hamas terrorist. While hiding at a nearby Muslim cemetery, he opened fire with an AK-47 rifle toward Melamed and a child who happened to be passing by. Security forces who arrived at the scene shot and eliminated the terrorist and no injuries were reported in the attack.
"I heard explosions above my head and saw a small child playing with a ball in front of me," Melamed said. "I told the child to duck. At first, I thought they were shooting fireworks at us, but I noticed ricochets were flying off the walls. I looked around and saw a big, chubby man with a beard and an Arab kippah, wearing a brown suit, with an AK-47 between his legs, about eight meters away from me. I told the child to run, and I also ran toward the nearby IDF base."
"Three soldiers came out after hearing the shots; he fired a burst at them, and they retreated," according to Melamad. "I told them he was close by because they didn't understand where the shots were coming from. He walked around in the cemetery, there were a lot of bushes there, and he stood between two trees that concealed him. I saw his face, gave them an accurate identification, and then about 20 soldiers took positions and engaged him in a firefight for about five to six minutes until they took him down."
"They immediately asked me if I saw any other terrorists, and I told them I saw one. It was very scary; you could see your own death. For me, it was like October 7 again. You know, in the middle of a Saturday, there’s a terrorist in the middle of your neighborhood with a rifle, and there's no one around. Suddenly a terrorist jumps out of nowhere, and there’s only me and another child in the street, and I'm unarmed. It was a miracle."
Settlement and National Missions Minister Orit Strock commented on the attack on Sunday, and the attempt to harm the child, 10-year-old Yitzhak. During a government meeting, Strock handed Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu Yitzhak's soccer ball - which was hit by a bullet.
"You can clearly see an entry hole and an exit hole, in the ball and not in the child," the minister noted.
"Many questions arose about the attack, that ended with a miracle, during the government meeting. The important ones concern the death announcement and the honor given to the terrorist by the Palestinian Authority, the dismantling of terror infrastructure in Hebron, and facilitations during Ramadan," she added.