Photo Credit: Rabbi Shmuel Eliyahu's Facebook page

Chief Rabbi of Tzfat Rabbi Shmuel Eliyahu, who is not known for particularly leftwing sympathies (he encourages his flock to refuse Arab renters, for instance), on Thursday night told a class he was teaching that one of his students had phoned him from the scene of the ramming attack that killed an IDF soldier. The student posed a halachic inquiry:

“He told me, I see my buddy here lying down dead,” Rabbi Eliyahu recalled, adding that his student had asked, “I have an opportunity to kill the terrorist – should I kill him or not?”




Around 10 AM, Thursday, an Arab terrorist rammed his vehicle into two IDF soldiers waiting at a hitchhiking post on Rt. 60, outside Ofra in Judea and Samaria. Sgt. Elhai Teharlev HY”D, 20, was killed, and the other soldier was injured. The terrorist was arrested by security forces.

Rabbi Eliyahu said that his response was that “this terrorist deserves to die. However, unfortunately, the laws in this country are not well constructed, and so there is no legal way to do to him what needs to be done.”

“I told him that had he been able to do it while the attack was on it would have been possible, but we were after the event, unfortunately.”