Free Republic

It takes more than a murderer's knife to kill the Jewish spirit. One year after five members of the Fogel family were brutally stabbed to death, the residents of their small farming community in the West Bank dedicated a new religious school in their honor. Itamar, a quiet hilltop town surrounded by hostile Arab villages, has earned a tragic distinction as "the most wounded community." Since its founding in 1984, a series of terror attacks has killed twenty-two people (including nine children) in a town of just 200 families. Yet after each massacre, the people of Itamar rebuild and replant,...

The leftists visited several homes in the Samaria village, including that of the Awad family, which spawned the murderers. The identities of the confessed murderers were released for publication on Sunday, the day after the visit. The murderers were already in IDF custody at the time of the leftists' visit and their arrest - including the fact that they are relatively young - was already widely rumored and hinted at by the press. A photograph from the visit which can be viewed here, posted by one of the activists on her Internet blog, shows Raya Yaron, spokeswoman of Machsom Watch,...

Police have arrested Hakim Mazen Niad Awad, 17, and Amjad Mahmoud Fawzi, 18, in the West Bank village of Awarta on suspicion of murdering in their beds five members of the Fogel family in neighboring Itamar on March 11. They confessed they were motivated by an ambition to kill Jews as Palestinian nationalists and die as martyrs. They expressed no remorse. After climbing the Itamar perimeter fence, the pair stole an M16 automatic rifle from an empty house, broke into the Fogel home and knifed two children Yoav and Elad. Their parents Udi and Ruthie Fogel woke up to find...