A teenager from Sharon, Mass., was one of three people murdered in Israel on Thursday afternoon when a Palestinian man attacked cars stuck in traffic in the West Bank.
Ezra Schwartz, 18, a recent high school graduate, was spending a “gap year” in Israel studying and performing community service through a program at Yeshiva Ashreinu. Schwartz and five other yeshiva students were in a minivan driving to bring snacks to Israeli Defense Force soldiers when the gunman opened fire with a submachine gun on a road near the settlement of Alon Shvut.
The Times of Israel has identified the shooter as 24-year-old Mohammed Abdel Basset al-Kharoub, from the West Bank Village of Dir Smat near Hebron.
A spokesperson for the U.S. State Department, told The Jerusalem Post that the U.S. “condemn(s) these terrorist attacks against innocent civilians in the strongest possible terms.”
Schwartz, a graduate of the Maimonides School, a Jewish Day School in Brookline, planned to attend Rutgers University in New Jersey next fall, according to the Jewish Daily Forward.
A 49-year-old Israeli man and a 24-year-old Palestinian man were also killed in the attack. Police arrested al-Kharoub at the scene after he intentionally rammed his car into another vehicle.
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