Why Terrorists Use Vehicles as Weapons

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Ramming attacks have been a weapon in the arsenal of Palestinian terrorists for some time now. During last summer’s fighting in Gaza, for instance, a construction excavator was used to attack a bus in Jerusalem, earning the praise of a Hamas spokesman.

In 2011, when a stolen taxi rammed into a police roadblock outside a club in Tel Aviv, injuring seven, the Jerusalem Post reported that it was the fifth attack of its kind in the past three years. The worst of these was the 2008 bulldozer attack in Jerusalem that killed three people and injured dozens of others.

“It’s obviously an inferior tactic to bombings,” Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, a counterterrorism researcher at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, told me, noting that one attacker died for every victim in both of the recent incidents. “In Israel, part of the reason you’re seeing it adopted is that the security barrier is fairly effective, which makes it hard to get bombs into the country.”
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