More Israeli civilians are murdered by terrorist fanatics

Two West Bank Palestinians walked into a crowded tourist district in Tel Aviv and opened fire in a cafe, killing four Israelis.

The city has fewer large-scale attacks than it did some years ago, partly due to the success of the security wall that it built. Then the problem was mainly suicide bombings, that happened in locations such as cafes.

But in recent months it has suffered a horrifying wave of random stabbings.

Israel, a flourishing democracy and civilisation, has long been on the frontline of fanatical Islamic violence.

For decades, few people in the West of the world seemed to care much, despite the fact that only Israel in the region fully matches western values, such as freedom of speech and full professional opportunities for women.

You might have expected, however, that attitudes would have changed and sympathy would have grown after western capitals such as New York, London, Madrid, Paris and Brussels also suffered at the hands of terrorist savages. But it is taking an alarmingly long time for widespread and unequivocal sympathy for Israeli victims to make itself apparent.

That vile organisation Hamas, the Islamic militant group that rules Gaza, welcomed this latest heinous and calculated attack on civilians. This is the group, it is worth noting, that the leader of the Labour Party no less, Jeremy Corbyn, has had such difficulty in condemning.

A Hamas official Mushir al-Masri has described the shootings as a “heroic operation” and promised the “Zionists” more “surprises” during Ramadan. Israel, which rightly takes its own security seriously (instead of the European approach of pandering to the human rights of terrorist murderers), has announced sweeping restrictions on Palestinian movement and deployed hundreds of additional troops on the ground.

Israel has many friends in Northern Ireland who will be wishing its citizens well amid this latest trauma.