Youth Hopes To Reach 500 Firebombs Hurled At Jews Before Int’l Media Report Any

By the time journalists can no longer justify turning a blind eye to his terrorism, he will already reach the mark.

Ma’aleh Adummim, December 1 – A Palestinian teen who spends his afternoons and evenings flinging Molotov cocktails toward cars with Israeli license plates on the road connecting this town of 20,000 people with Jerusalem and surrounding communities keeps a running tally of his achievements, and harbors an ambition to perpetrate a certain number of such attacks without reporters from mainstream Western outlets informing their audiences of the daily phenomenon.

Muhammad Attiyah, 17, established a routine during the summer of 2020 that included the preparation and use of Molotov cocktails against Israeli motorists, a practice that began during summer vacation but that he found time to maintain even when the 2020-2021 academic year began. Then then-sixteen-year-old has, by his own count, assembled close to three hundred homemade firebombs, of which he boasts more than 250 have flown from his hand toward Israeli cars and buses. Attiyah, however, aims not only to cause as much harm, and preferably death or injury, to his targets; he hopes that international news agencies continue to ignore those activities of him and his like-minded buddies as long as possible in an effort to preserve the Palestinians-as-helpless-victims narrative that tends to frame stories about the Arab-Israeli conflict in Western media, and that by the time those journalists can no longer justify turning a blind eye to his terrorism, he will already reach the 500 mark. Attiyah estimates he will hit that plateau sometime in early 2022.

“I’m no so naïve as to think I can escape Western news coverage forever,” he acknowledged, toting a backpack with eight Molotov cocktails one weekday afternoon. “At some point either the Israeli army will come in and do something, forcing the reporters to mention what it’s all about, or one of my bombs will finally result in a serious death toll, like if I hit the front of a bus and the driver goes over the side of the mountain or something. I’d love for that to happen now, but I also kind of want to hit that magic number, just as a personal goal.”

Attiyah stresses that he avoids aiming at trucks, which often have Arab drivers, and concentrates on buses or passenger vehicles with yellow license plates. “All the others are Palestinian Authority-registered, so we know those can’t be Jews,” he explained. “I just stand on this outcropping here and lob. It can get windy, so my aim isn’t always great, but most days I manage to do some damage. Once I even caused a car to run off the road and crash. I wanted to hurl some at the ambulances that came by soon afterwards, but I was out of ammo.”

“Also there’s a but of attrition, and a not-insignificant number of duds,” he noted. “But I’m getting better at this each day. When you see me on the mainstream news, I’ll be an ace.”

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