TY - JOUR T1 - Knife stabbing attacks in the West Bank: implementing a modern response chain to an ancient foe JF - Emergency Medicine Journal JO - Emerg Med J SP - 301 LP - 302 DO - 10.1136/emermed-2015-205655 VL - 33 IS - 4 AU - Adi Leiba AU - Orel Ben Ishay AU - Haim Ossadon AU - Hagay Frenkel Y1 - 2016/04/01 UR - http://emj.bmj.com/content/33/4/301.abstract N2 - The knife, whether in its original form or as a spear, rapier, dagger, sword, sabre or bayonet has long served as an instrument of traumatic assault.1While medical corps personnel in the West Bank are trained in the care of trauma injuries from stones, rocks, Molotov cocktail and other injuries related to violent protests, they were faced with very few cases of violent knife stabbing in the last decade.In the last few months, we have been facing a renewed though ancient foe, with daily stabbings, which caused more harm than knife wounds of criminal or social origin.2Kiryat Arba is a small Jewish settlement near Hebron, a large Palestinian city. Both Muslims and Jews pray at the nearby ‘Cave of Macpela’, which both believe to be the burial place of biblical Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, Sara, Rebecca and Leah. As the political destiny of the ‘West Bank’ is still unsettled, not being part of either a Palestinian or a Jewish state, relations between Palestinians and Jews are tense, sometimes hostile, and Israeli soldiers are stationed at potential sites of friction.On 8 October (Thursday) in the afternoon, a Palestinian stabbed a 31 year-old man, a Jewish civilian living in Kiryat Arba. The Palestinian stabbed the settler in his back and abdomen and fled into the city of Hebron (figure 1). The patient had a shallow cut in his back, but with no respiratory compromise, and a … ER -