An Israeli Border Policewoman became a viral sensation in Israel last week, but for the wrong reason, said a writer for Israel’s Channel 2 on Sunday.

Shai Levi took the Israeli public to task for poking fun at the young woman, who was among Israeli security forces confronted by a female terrorist at the Afula central bus station in northern Israel on Friday.

After entering the bus station, the terrorist attempted to stab a soldier waiting on the platform. Border Police officers on the scene opened fire on the terrorist’s lower body – to neutralize, rather than kill, her.

Video footage of the incident showed one of the Border Police, the young woman in question, taking part in subduing the terrorist, without letting go of a decadent looking ice cream she had been eating. It is this, more than the attack itself, which created the most buzz in Israel, currently ravaged by daily stabbing attacks and other acts of Palestinian terrorism.

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Levi used his op-ed as a kind of open letter to the young woman, who – it turned out – was inducted into the IDF only two months ago, and had barely learned how to use her weapon. He wanted her to know that in his eyes, she is a “hero.” The issue, he wrote, is not that she held on to the ice cream, but that she did not shy away from confronting a terrorist.

“I, too, have been under fire, and have even seen a terrorist or two in my life,” he wrote. “And it is clear to me that she [the Border Policewoman] did not even know or remember that she had the popsicle in her hand. Under such circumstances, the brain works on its own wave-length, becoming a kind of machine. You can be sure she was not trying to save the cost of the ice cream pop…. It is pretty obvious that the ice cream was not in her consciousness, and that is why she did not throw it aside.”