The decisive question is why one society’s political, religious and media institutions repeatedly provide a ready-made target, a heroic script and communal validation for those who commit terror.
On August 23, a 16-year-old Palestinian Arab approached Elchanan Hanania from behind near the village of al-Auja in the Jordan Valley and stabbed him repeatedly. Hanania, a 24-year-old career soldier, was traveling to Tiberias with his pregnant wife, two young daughters and father-in-law to celebrate his wedding anniversary. His family watched from the car as he fought off his attacker. The assailant fled and was captured by Israeli forces later that day.
The attack required no bomb factory, firearms network, training camp or operational commander. It required a knife, an accessible victim and a teenager so violent that he is prepared to risk death or imprisonment in order to attack a stranger.
That is what makes stabbing terrorism so difficult to prevent-and so easy to misunderstand. The assailant may act alone, but he does not arrive at the act alone. The weapon is individual. The permission, language, symbols and promised honor are supplied by a much larger environment.
The Misleading “Lone Wolf”
The term “lone wolf” suggests isolation: a disturbed individual detached from society and acting without external influence. In counterterrorism, however, “lone actor” has a narrower meaning. It generally describes someone who plans and executes an attack without direct command and control from a terrorist organization. It does not mean that the attacker developed his beliefs in a vacuum.
Recent research makes this distinction clear. In a 2024 study in “Perspectives on Politics, “Stefan Malthaner, Francis O’Connor and Lasse Lindekilde found that lone-actor attacks are socially embedded and tend to cluster in time and place. The perpetrators absorb ideas, tactics and legitimacy from radical communities even when no organization gives them an order.
The Palestinian case follows this pattern. Harel Chorev Halewa of Tel Aviv University, examining Palestinian Arab lone assailants from 2015 through early 2023 in Studies in Conflict & Terrorism, identified several intersecting drivers: a younger generation with different social and political attitudes, social media, personal motives and the indirect strategies used by Palestinian Arab organizations to exploit these developments.
This is neither centrally commanded terrorism nor meaningless spontaneity. It is decentralized violence conducted within a shared moral and political framework. Leaderless does not mean causeless.
Why the Knife?
The knife is not merely a symbol. It is an instrument of opportunity. It is inexpensive, universally available, easily concealed and requires almost no training. A teenager who cannot obtain a firearm, manufacture an explosive or join a terrorist cell can still take a knife from a kitchen and select a nearby target.
Yet opportunity alone does not explain how the knife became a cultural icon. During the 2015 terrorism wave, widely circulated Palestinian cartoons showed a knife shaped like the entire Land of Israel beneath the slogan “Your knife is your freedom.” The “#stab” campaign shared illustrations encouraging attacks, while a Hamas video demonstrated how they should be carried out. The weapon was therefore both accessible and ritualized: not simply a tool chosen after radicalization, but an advertised path by which an individual could join the national struggle.
The numbers are revealing. A 2023 study in Crime & Delinquency compared 83 minor and 82 adult lone-actor terrorists who attacked in Israel during 2015 and 2016. Researchers Revital Sela-Shayovitz, Hava Dayan and Badi Hasisi found that 95.2 percent of the minors used a knife or other sharp object, compared with 72 percent of the adults. Seventy-nine percent of the minors attacked near where they lived. Nearly 70 percent selected police or military targets that were easy to identify and approach.
The attacks by minors were far less lethal than those by adults. That does not make them less important as terrorism. Their strategic value lies partly in the disproportion between the simplicity of the weapon and the fear it produces. A bombing requires a plot. A stabbing can happen at a bus stop, a supermarket, a street corner or beside a family car. It turns ordinary proximity into suspicion and daily life into a potential battlefield.
The al-Auja attack was not an isolated return to an obsolete tactic. One month earlier, on July 23, two separate stabbing attacks in Samaria seriously wounded an Israeli civilian near the Derech Avraham Farm and lightly wounded an IDF paratrooper near Ganim. The circumstances and degree of planning differed, but the tactical appeal was the same: immediate access and a target selected at close range. The recurrence is precisely the point. A tactic this inexpensive and decentralized never entirely disappears. It remains available for the next person who receives sufficient motive and permission.
Terrorism is not measured only by the number of people it kills. It is also measured by the number it frightens and the routines it disrupts. A single knife can force the deployment of hundreds of soldiers and police officers, empty public spaces and make an entire population look over its shoulder.
Private Grievance, Public Enemy
Poverty is often presented as the master explanation for Palestinian Arab terrorism. The evidence has never supported such confidence. Alan Krueger and Jitka Male?ková found no simple causal link between poverty, low education and terrorism. Claude Berrebi’s study of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad similarly found that participation was not concentrated among the poorest or least educated. Removing economic hardship is desirable, but it does not by itself remove a political and religious ideology that legitimizes murder.
The opposite mistake is to assume that every attacker possesses an identical theological or political motive. Lone actors do not share one psychological profile. Some are driven by religious or nationalist conviction; others by revenge, humiliation, family conflict, depression, a desire for status or even a wish to die. In many cases, the precise motive remains unknown.
This complexity does not diminish the role of ideology. It clarifies it. Ideology does not always create the personal wound; it tells the wounded person whom to blame. It converts private despair into public violence, identifies the Jew or Israeli as a permissible target and offers the attacker a path from obscurity to honor.
Calling attention to personal distress is therefore an explanation, not an excuse. Millions of people experience poverty, humiliation or psychological pain without stabbing strangers. The decisive question is why one society’s political, religious and media institutions repeatedly provide a ready-made target, a heroic script and communal validation for those who do.
The identity of the targets also matters. Palestinian Arab attackers have struck soldiers and civilians, adults and children, on both sides of the 1949 armistice line. Bassam Tawil has noted that Palestinian Arab leaders and media routinely collapse these distinctions by describing Jews in Beersheba, Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria alike as “settlers.” The term then ceases to describe geography and becomes a license: if all Israel is one settlement, every Jew can be treated as its representative. Mahmoud al-Zahar, a co-founder and senior leader of Hamas, stated the objective without ambiguity in 2015: expelling the Jews “from all Palestine” was a religious commandment before it was a national duty.
The Infrastructure of Permission
An organized terrorist needs instructions. A lone actor needs permission and an audience.
During the 2015-2016 stabbing jihad, Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad circulated videos and images urging Palestinians to stab Jews. Palestinian Arab social media provided diagrams, celebrated attackers and rapidly transmitted the tactic from one teenager to another. In 2019, Chorev described how these platforms did more than communicate incitement. They created an online subculture with its own codes, rituals and alternative sources of authority. Violence spread like an epidemic because each attack advertised the next one.
The role of political leadership was equally important. On official Palestinian Authority television on September 16, 2015, Mahmoud Abbas declared that Jews had no right to “defile” the al-Aqsa Mosque with their “filthy feet” and added: “We bless every drop of blood that has been spilled for Jerusalem.”
Adam Shay and Pinhas Inbari aptly described the resulting strategy as “planned to be unplanned.” No written order was required. Public rhetoric defined the danger, blessed the blood and left individuals to choose the time and weapon.
Martyrdom culture changes the attacker’s calculation further. When death in an attack is presented not as failure but as religious elevation, social prestige and family honor, the normal deterrent loses force. Brig. Gen. Yossi Kuperwasser has explained how the Palestinian use of the concept of “death for Allah” promises the shahid a privileged place in the next world and recognition in this one. The attacker may fail to kill, yet still believe he has succeeded.
Not every Palestinian Arab accepts this culture, and many undoubtedly reject the murder of civilians. That makes the silence or intimidation of dissenters all the more consequential. A society changes only when those who oppose terrorism are protected and its institutions-not merely isolated individuals-withdraw the legitimacy they have given it.
What Must Change
Israel can reduce the opportunity for attacks through intelligence, surveillance of genuine threats, armed first responders, physical security and rapid intervention. Israeli officials credited social-media monitoring with helping to reduce the 2015-2017 wave sharply. Responsible media coverage can also deny attackers some of the fame and psychological impact they seek.
But security measures treat the final stage of the process. They do not dismantle the infrastructure of permission.
That requires Palestinian Arab leaders to condemn attacks clearly and consistently in Arabic, end the glorification of attackers, remove incitement from schools and official media, stop material rewards tied to imprisonment or “martyrdom,” and challenge religious authorities who turn murder into worship. It also requires early intervention with vulnerable teenagers before their personal crises are absorbed into an extremist script.
The West repeatedly searches for a single “root cause” because a single cause suggests a simple remedy. Raise living standards. Negotiate another agreement. Police social media. Improve mental-health services. Each may be useful, but none is sufficient by itself.
The stabbing terrorist emerges where motive, opportunity and legitimacy meet. Personal grievance supplies the fuel. A knife supplies the means. Social media supplies the model and audience. Political and religious incitement supplies the enemy and moral permission.
A knife is only steel. The more dangerous weapon is the moral world that teaches a 16-year-old that his pain, anger or ambition can be purified by plunging it into a stranger-and that murder can transform him into a hero.
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