Father of one, yeshiva student gunned down outside West Bank settlement outpost; ‘He was a sweet person, welcoming to all,’ says friend injured in attack
The fatality of Thursday’s terror shooting was named as Yehudah Dimentman, 25, a father of one from the West Bank settlement of Shavei Shomron.
He was a student at the yeshiva, or religious school, in the Homesh outpost in the West Bank, near where the attack took place.
He leaves behind a wife and son, a 9-month-old infant, according to Hebrew media reports.
Dimentman and two others were fired on while driving a car as they left Homesh on Thursday night. A military official said the car had been hit by an ambush from the side of the road.
The two other passengers sustained light injuries in the attack from broken glass.
One of the other passengers, Aviah Entman, 22, told reporters about Dimentman from the hospital.
“He was my friend. He was a really good guy. He was a very sweet person and was welcoming to everyone who wanted to speak with him. We got to talk a lot,” Entman said. “He was fun to have as a friend. We didn’t have any fear of a shooting. We didn’t think it could happen.”
“It’s hard for me to believe he’s no longer with us. Just in our last conversation today he came to me all happy and said, ‘Today I won something.’ I asked him what happened and he told me his wife had asked him to take care of his child for awhile. He said he was happy he would be with the child.”
The other passenger in the car, Neria Feldman, said, “Yehuda was sitting behind me and yelled that he had a bullet in his neck and really started to have a hard time breathing. I was calling into emergency services so they would know where we were.”
“Aviah and I were taken to the hospital in an ambulance when we found out that Yehudah was no longer with us.”
Entman and Feldman were sent to Meir Medical Center in Kfar Saba and were expected to be released soon.
Channel 13 reported that Entman had survived another violent attack in East Jerusalem eight months ago.
Dimentman’s older brother, Shlomi Dimentman, told the Ynet news site, “I heard there was a terror attack. I know the community there so I said a prayer.”
“I didn’t want to call my brother because I thought he would be busy, so I prayed, and went home, then found out that Yehudah was among the injured.”
“It’s a huge loss. I still haven’t absorbed it,” he said.
Medics arriving at the scene performed CPR on Dimentman, who suffered a critical neck wound, but were forced to pronounce him dead.
His funeral procession will leave from Homesh at 9 a.m. on Friday, stop at the site of the shooting, then continue to Jerusalem. The funeral will be held at 12 p.m. in Jerusalem’s Givat Shaul cemetery, a settlement spokesperson said.
Homesh is a settlement that was meant to have been abandoned as part of a 2005 eviction but is now the site of an illegally operated yeshiva.
Brig. Gen. Avi Bluth, commander of the IDF division responsible for the area, said at least 10 bullets were fired into the car.
Israeli troops were quickly deployed to the scene, setting up checkpoints and blocking roadways throughout the area in an effort to catch the perpetrators.
“We are grabbing any threads there are to pull,” said Bluth, commander of the IDF’s Judea and Samaria Division, named for the biblical term for the West Bank.
Bluth said reinforcements were being brought into the area in the form of three infantry battalions, special forces and intelligence collection units.
Bluth refused to comment on the investigation, including who the military believed was behind the attack and where it was focusing its search efforts.
The Palestinian terror groups Hamas, Islamic Jihad and Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine praised the attack, but did not immediately take responsibility for it.
The past few weeks have seen a rise in Palestinian terror attacks, with four taking place in Jerusalem alone, including a deadly shooting committed by a member of Hamas.
The Kan public broadcaster reported that, in response to the attack, settlers were preparing to set up new buildings in Homesh.
As reported by The Times of Israel