1989 Purim Stabbing Attack

A polemical work by Meir Kahane places the alleged attack in northern Tel Aviv on March 22, 1989, during what it describes as local Purim celebrations. It characterizes the location as a wealthy and established part of the city.[1] Because no second accessible source cited here confirms the date, festival context, or location, those details remain attributed to that account rather than independently established.

The account names the alleged attacker as Abad al Rahman Muhamas Zakut and says he attacked Jews in the area, killing 74-year-old Dr. Kurt Shelisnger in front of the victim's home.[1] It then says Zakut was chased onto the roof of a nearby building, where he stabbed a policeman. According to the same passage, the policeman did not shoot him during the confrontation.[1]

The source further reports that Zakut stabbed and wounded another Jewish man during the attack.[1] The unusual spellings of both the alleged attacker's and the murdered man's names reproduce the sole account and have not been independently corroborated.

The account next places Zakut in a hospital bed, where he reportedly gave testimony to police while sharing a room with the Jewish man he had wounded.[1] It attributes the attack to his reaction upon seeing Jews celebrate Purim, saying this drove him to want to kill some of them.[1] No verified material used for this article establishes what charges, trial, sentence, or later legal outcome followed the alleged attack.

The episode is presently traceable here only to Israel: Revolution or Referendum?, which recounts it in politically charged language and does not provide a contemporaneous citation or use the designation “1989 Purim stabbing attack.”[1] The accessible page of an International Institute for Counter-Terrorism chronology reports six incidents for 1989 but does not display the individual entries in the fetched text; moreover, that chronology primarily concerns attacks against Jewish communities and Israeli citizens abroad, so it cannot meaningfully confirm or disprove a reported Tel Aviv incident.[2]

A selective Jewish Virtual Library list records a July 6, 1989 terrorist bus attack near Tel Aviv but contains no matching March 22 stabbing entry.[3] Absence from selective chronologies does not establish that the reported episode did not occur, but it leaves its date, participants, circumstances, and Purim connection dependent on the single account.

A separate terrorist stabbing murder occurred on June 22, 1989, when Prof. Menachem Stern was killed while walking his customary route from his home through Jerusalem's Emek HaMatzleva (Valley of the Cross) to the Hebrew University. Ynet describes Stern as an Israel Prize recipient in history and a leading scholar of the Second Temple period.[4][5] This documented murder should not be treated as corroboration of the alleged Purim attack.

Ynet identifies Mahmoud Ata Muammar as one of Stern's murderers and reports that the two murderers began serving their sentences in July 1992.[4] A later Ynet report states that Muammar, a Hebron resident, was released in 2013 during the third phase of a Palestinian-prisoner release.[5] The 2013 report said that phase involved 26 prisoners and that the government's broader plan called for 104 security prisoners to be released in four phases.[4]

Stern's daughter, Meira Stern-Glick, said the murder continued to cause the family pain and that her father had not lived to meet all his grandchildren.[4] A Globes report, however, lists Saleh Khalil Ahmad as having been convicted of murdering Stern, Eli Amsalem, and Hussein Zaid. It separately says that Muammar and an individual named Ibrahim were convicted in two murder cases without identifying those cases.[6] The available reports do not resolve whether these statements concern different co-perpetrators or reflect a reporting discrepancy.[4][6]