After two 13-year-old girls were arrested Thursday after stabbing a security guard at a bus station in Ramle, those who knew the girls said that they were good students who were incited to violence by videos on social media.

The Al-Jawarish School in Ramle, which the girls attend school, “promotes living together,” a school source told Haaretz on Friday. “Every Tuesday, the students learn English together with the Jewish Reut School that’s next to us. The girls always attended the classes with the Jewish pupils and never had a problem with any of them. This past Tuesday, there was also a joint Jewish-Arab class. We are very angry because we are always talking to the pupils about the importance of coexistence and mutual respect, and what they did contravenes every value they learned in school.”

An uncle of one of the girls called the attack “totally unacceptable,” stressing that his family had good relations with their Jewish neighbors. Haaretz reported that the girls’ aunt “speculated that the girls had seen videos encouraging attacks on social media and had been influenced by them.”

According to police reports, the security guard was stabbed in the leg and hand with kitchen knives after he asked the girls for identification. The guard’s injuries were reported to be light. The two girls were captured by a soldier and a civilian, and taken to police headquarters for questioning, where they reportedly told police that the attack was “revenge for the situation in the Al-Aqsa Mosque” and Israel’s “killing of Palestinians.”

Alleged Israeli changes to the Temple Mount, which the Israeli government has continually denied, have been frequent fodder for the anti-Israeli incitement.

The Shin Bet, Israel’s internal security agency, attributed the stabbing attack in which Dafna Meir, a mother of six, was stabbed to death by a 16-year-old last month to similar incitement. “On the day of the murder, while under the influence of the programs he had been exposed to on Palestinian television, the minor decided to commit a stabbing attack with the goal of murdering a Jew,” the agency said in a statement. It specifically cited “Palestinian television broadcasts which portrayed Israel as ‘killing young Palestinians.’”

Times of Israel editor in chief David Horovitz recently argued that much of the blame for such incitement must belong to Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas:

His duplicitous terrorism-fostering predecessor Yasser Arafat assured the Palestinians that they had no reason or need to compromise with the Jews because we were colonial invaders, an unrooted and temporary presence that his people’s stubbornness and terrorism would eventually see off. Abbas chose not to counter that narrative, not to acknowledge to his people the Jews’ history of sovereignty in the Holy Land, and more recently intensified the strategic campaign of misrepresentation — telling Palestinians that the Jews have no business at the Temple Mount.

According to Israel’s Magen David Adom emergency services, the latest wave of terror has produced 117 stabbings, 41 shootings, and 23 car-ramming incidents, resulting in 31 dead and 302 injured.

Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs described the current wave of terrorists to be “motivated for the most part by the lie spread by the Palestinian media that Israel allegedly threatened Al-Aqsa mosque, as well as by the frustration, desperation and anger of the younger generation. Generally speaking, the terrorists have not been operatives of any established terrorist organization, and the current wave of terrorism has not been directed by any organization, but rather is directly inspired by the intensive incitement accompanying it.”

[Photo: Magen David Adom]